divine in the flesh
jesus was an animal
crucified by fear
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
THE nEw THEORY of eVoLuTiOnArY CrEaTiOn
On the origin of species
***
With that massively complex system of neural networks and cognitive protocols inside your head, imagine.
If we cannot fathom the truth in evolution, but can only perceive that we were created once in perfection, never to grow into new form, then we shall not be able to lose opposable thumbs to the greater efficacy of fins when the water rises. Nor will we have access to wings for flight. We shall not survive to see our own fantastic rebirth. Thus we must recognize that our cooperation, in adapting to the insight of unification, is in line with the Plan and therefore imperative for our salvation.
the enlightenment of the beasts.
Monday, October 17, 2005
EVOLUTION Next
We never thought it would come to The End.
In fact, we bet our lives we wouldn't see the last day. But because of this blind eye we turned to consequence, the chain connecting our fragile, diminishing web of life broke. One link swallowed the next; and our precious structures crumbled, leaving us reaching from underneath the rubble of crushed illusions, our hands raised to Heaven seeking help. Finally.
Do you remember the awful sound it made?
It was the sound of a back breaking; a step on a crack. It was the last man standing. It was the slip of an Almighty finger that propped a living, teetering, spinning globe on its tip. Support corroded at the base; the crack spread, and the ball fell from grace. Strained to maximum capacity, Earth sucked in Her gut once more, and all Hell broke loose in Her abdomen. With the world knocked off its hinges, and its weight sent fumbling into darkness, life's systems swirled and spun like no other circus ride.
The Fat Lady pursed her lips, sucked every last ounce of atmospheric oxygen into her diaphragm through her toes, and to the increasingly loud rumble of an approaching drum, released the killer symphony that had been stifled in her stomach since humanity’s creation of the myth. With her song, plates shifted, and the thunderous roar of the world's disregard for what was coming saturated the air across the universe. The chill from her breath was so cruel that the roots of the underworld shivered and grew crisp like the grass of a morning nearing winter.
Hell froze over.
And the hot liquid magma in the belly of Earth swelled and hardened like a giant red snow cone; an ulcer of fire and ice. Pigs up and flew, becoming pink tornadoes in the sky of false presumption. A genie granting humans their death wish huffed and puffed and lit millions of acres of forest on fire. Warm ocean waters grew cold. Newborn's howled at the state of the world and prayed for a return trip through the birth canal. Mountains eroded, adding aged layers of silty parfait to geological document. Volcanoes spewed heaving last breaths and the ground swallowed fire and coughed ashes.
Nature's order was in complete disarray. Taxonomic identifications and chemical equations would be obsolete within the coming age, which was crashing like a tidal wave and caving in on Time. The internal clash of fire and ice in the stomach of Earth caused Her foundation to spring leaks; the fire melted the ice, and the land began to flood.
Cars, in their armor, refused to float and became sunken treasures at the bottom of the unifying sea. City buildings became miniatures in a giant living aquarium. Water-logged computer systems went haywire, lights shut off, data was lost, history books formed fossils, and files were erased, discontinuing social security-coined identities and washing clocks and calendars under the riptide of all of history.
People frantically hurried to the top floors of sky-scrapers, the turrets of churches and mosques, the attics of multi-story houses, pleading desperate prayers to any God in the red sky above that might listen. Despite their last-minute pleas, another era spilled back into the ocean where all began; where all end...where all begins.
***
Humans kicked like babies thrown in at birth. Humility saturated their gurgled cries as they went under, and with assurance of their remorse, God let out a moan, low and deep in the sea, where the water pressure carried sound in concentrated form until it reached into the heart of every water droplet and made it sing. The melody, recognized as both an alarm and a rejoicing, sent troops of earth angels to begin rescue.
Chosen, and subsequently biologically endowed, for this mission were the grand masters of pelagic life; the mystical giants of perfect propulsion through time and trend; the biggest bodies and biggest brains of all time; The Great Whales.
In the years preceding this event in human history, whales and dolphins had used their posts in captivity, or in otherwise close proximity to humans, as the context for practicing as ambassadors. Representatives of several species had been liaisons between the wet and dry worlds, to observe and study the ways of human behavior, and to motivate the spiritual direction of human evolution. At the dawning of this new era, God knew that, although humanity at large was battling a destructive force threatening to overcome its collective will, those humans who chose to save themselves most certainly could. It would simply be a matter of surrender, and a knocking-loose of the individual will from complacency.
Humans were still adaptable, and thus were considered a species fit to survive, given adjustments to their immediate geophysical environment, their accessibility to natural resources, and their reliance upon them for energy and power. And to mental and spiritual hindrances, like the seemingly inherent pronation toward aggression in the human brain, which led to a sense of inner conflict that caused self-dissatisfaction and external destruction, from inside the individual, out. It was from the trough of this turmoil within, that greed and hedonism could feed. And did, until the plate was nearly clean, and itself, devoured nearly beyond recognition.
God had in store, though, for those who chose goodness, rebirth into a home in the solace of Mother Sea's tranquil belly. With Her nurturing to soothe those troubled souls, and quiet those self-deprecating voices of hopelessness, God had faith in humans' living on.
***
As the terrified humans flailed and wailed for mercy, the rescue mission began from the depths. The humans who had given up hope by The End had simply resisted the struggle; let the water pour in, and surrendered, not to the eternal wake of belief, but to the dark Finality. Those with faith waited patiently in their places, treading water. They were fueled by the strength of something bigger than themselves.
From the deepest caverns of ocean's mystery, the great whales rose up to meet the challenge of earth’s interdependent destiny. Their responsibility was to assist in redirecting history, at the interface between human and non-human intelligence.
***
The humpbacks fired forth, singing gospel that echoed through the pulpits of choral reef until they vibrated. Bowheads speared up from Alaska and the Chuckchi Sea in small but quick packs. Herds of northern and southern right whales jetted up from Argentina and the Bay of Fundy, carrying hitch-hiking callosities that colored them like speeding tulip bouquets. North Atlantic pilots flew at supersonic speed like super heroes to the scene. Bottlenose and spotted dolphins caught the ride of each other's wake, galloping across water tops at 50 nauts. Sperm whales, each weighing multiple tons, shot like bottle rockets from Soviet waters. Beaked whales from South Africa and New Zealand, spectacled porpoises from Tierra Del Fuego, Bristol Bay belugas, and the sleek, gargantuan blues, biggest animals ever to exist, drilled toward the surface like a synchronized fleet of steadily-breathing submarines. The leaders of the revolution, charging in from all parts of the world, were the orcas, whose striking black and white embodied the purity and salvation of balance and harmony.
All the whales in the world shot skyward into epiphany. The white water trails behind them, the diversified colors of ambition pointed out from every fascicle at the core, turned the earth into a supreme firework in mid-burst. With the entire cetacean nation's participation in the collective effort to save the humans, the shuddering earth sputtered to a lull, then halted at once. The height of chaos subsided, and all was calm and quiet.
***
While the exhausted humans began sinking, despite their small bodies' concerted efforts to survive, a whale positioned itself underneath each one of them and pushed their tiny selves to the surface. All creatures breathed at once, at first gasping, then deeply sighing with relief for the stillness that finally hushed the waters. Those humans still alive opened their clenched-shut eyes. They were surprised to find themselves, not in the purgatory of the next mass extinction; but in the rubble-studded aftermath of a tremendous awakening. And resting peacefully on the unbreakable back of forgiveness.
Humans realized they could feed off of the earth’s forgiveness of them, and use their resulting store of strength in forgiving themselves and their own species, where guilt had nearly eaten them hungry before the flood. The planet idled softly, the sun and moon fizzled on weary bulbs. In their spirit as altruistic animals, the whales remained in place assisting humans at the surface, until humans developed the capacity to traverse the water world with the grace and ease of their saviors. Eventually, humans would learn to swim of their own evolving will.
***
Humans spent the next several million years growing accustomed to life in the sea. Drawing from fossilized memories embedded deep within the DNA of their ancestral lineage, humans changed shape to meet the demands of water life. Saltwater was not a completely foreign medium to the human race. In fact it was familiar, within the cellular storage of life's origin, to all animal races. This made gaining efficiency and adaptive fitness in this new environment a matter of remembrance; and a newfound, profound reverence for the blessing of life.
An epic sort of deja vu shed a dim but identifiable light on humans' past, as the race had evolved through time in ways very similar to Earth and all other organisms. Fundamentally, those humans who were willing to learn were reduced to their humble beginnings. And in their evolution from The End forward, their progress imitated that of the very first unicellular being to emerge from the sea some four and a half billion years prior.
From as deep as the ocean within every biological existent, in some ancient, divine code, is a remembrance of life before life began. Fathoms below unfathomable depth, lies the original idea behind Supreme Creativity. Woven between every dancing molecule in the fluid matrix of biological design, lives the primitive recipe for birth. The most remote of any memory brings the universe and its every being back 42 billion years into the past, when a series of cataclysmic supernovas and a fizz of exploding stars found their way into the solar system. It wouldn't be until some 30 billion years forward on the time line of Nothingness, that matter would emerge to eventually facilitate Everything.
Humans remembered that their own DNA was compatible with that of the bacteria that initiated photosynthesis over 570 million years earlier, thus giving rise to oxygen and making life outside of saltwater possible. The first cells thrived in the sea's store of organic molecules; complex carbon was the spinach that built cells into beings. And from the beginning, there was an outstanding degree of uniformity among all living things. All cells were created equal, all cells had the same molecular symmetry, all proteins were made from the same miniature ribosomes. All of us, in our depths, were simply genetic codes; strands marked with the collision of egg and sperm, some complex chemistry, and the master plan for biologically-conjoined existence. From a glowing ball of cells in the water, tissues formed an ancient invertebrate enveloped in a sac of fluid similar to the primeval seas. Masses of cells first made an embryo, then a fetus. And eventually, the first newborn was birthed of virgin water.
Humans remembered their long-standing likeness to the free-swimming sea squirt, whose primitive spinal cord gave it the title of 'first vertebrate', ancestral parent to all the rest. Humans remembered their ancestors' course through oceans' amniotic estuaries before a violent birth out of liquid, onto calloused feet to walk the land as bipedal primates.
They remembered that Eve was a mermaid, and Adam a land-man, trying to grow back the fins he wore as a fish in the womb...living only for his return to absolute Love.
Long before humans were human, their genetics' intuition heeded the warning that land was dangerous, and water was better. Land was barren, forbidding, and exposed to ultra-violet light. It wasn't until enough oxygen blanketed the earth, creating the ozone layer, that there was protection enough for animals to venture out and dry off. Land was harsh. Animals had to learn to store liquid in their bodies so they wouldn't die of thirst. Eggs needed more protection on land. Cold and heat were extreme. And gravity required strong bones for support. Animals had to either adapt or perish. Being free-willed mortals in the making, humans made their first collective "choice" as a species and grew legs, despite the warnings of the physical world.
Once returned to the sea, Humans began to develop physical characteristics to aid their success as swimming apes. They had already been progressing in this fated direction for millions of years, evident in the fact that they had shed their heavy coats of fur, becoming naked apes, for more efficient swimming. Just as the hippo had turned into a naked ungulate, the walrus a naked pinniped, and the porpoise a naked cetacean, humans became naked again, like infants, open and vulnerable to the harsh conditions of spiritual learning.
They went from eating meat, fruits and vegetables to eating shrimp and baby crab; edible sea weed, kelp, and moss for vitamin content. As years passed and adaptations enhanced to meet a changing environment, the humans' legs dwindled to vestigial size and moved farther apart, eventually becoming flippers.
Humans were truly changing, growing out of the restrictions that had plagued their species for so long. It was by the omnipotent direction of Father God and the Nurturing guidance of Mother Sea, that humans would grow into bodies and brains the size of the whales'.
***
In retrospect, humans' great detraction from animal enlightenment in the twenty first century seemed an imminent regression. From the time Homo sapiens split off most recently from the rest of the great ape family, their brains had grown bigger, and life had progressed with the advance of technology in mind. Humans had gained the ability to stand on two legs rather than four. This lengthened and straightened the spine, which allowed for the vocal cords to morph into a shape conducive to forming verbal language. In the meantime, their opposable-thumb-equipped hands were freed up for holding, throwing, and even fashioning tools and weapons. It had been deduced, in anthropological study in the End times, that the same part of the brain responsible for the hands' fine motor control was also responsible for speech. This explained why humans acquired language once they began exercising the use of their hands to a greater and more intricate extent.
As humans became more agile and dexterous in forming rocks and bone into weapons and tools, their perception – and evolving consciousness - took on a more sequential structure. Their understanding of the three-dimensional world became more linear, as their mental processes led them through the foresight and follow-through of willed activities, uni-directionally, across the line of time.
Eventually, after a trek across millions of years in Earth's history, this type of biological progress would lead to the creativity and intellectualism of the End times. Humans had produced a world of great speed and technological efficiency. And were also responsible for the creation of many beautiful works of art, inspired by the capacity of the human Self as Divine muse. However, an evolving brain that continued progressing in design toward the likes of either an emotionless super-computer, or an overly emotional smoldering coal, (at its extremes), was in dire need of "returning" (or advancing) to its more simultaneous and unified way of functioning.
While humans in a few parts of the world were rich and powerful by means of a monetary system of exchange, most humans were struggling to survive in oppressive social, economic, and political systems. A couple of nations had become the all-powerful overseers of the rest of the world's well-being, and were not taking on the vast ethical responsibility necessary to claim such a dictatorial position. Not only did the oppressive dynamic cage people into hopeless situations, destroying spirits and birthing more and more generations of slaves; it also wreaked havoc over the entire Earthly ecosystem, holding It the ultimate prisoner of human conscience.
Humans, on the whole, had appointed themselves to be the dominant force, important and superior over all other living creatures. The collective human philosophy supported the idea of a "ladder of worth", upon which humans sat atop the highest rung. The brains that had advanced further into this format of linear abstraction placed a living being's worth, at first, on how intelligent it was according to human standards and a human definition of intelligence. And eventually, the scale became a delusional metaphor for humans' self-possessed egos, isolated in a chamber of greed and selfishness, outside of which existed life that differed from other life only by degrees of separation from human "perfection".
Most humans considered their own species superior by a massive number of degrees. It had become apparent, that in the stagnant state of intellectual and spiritual progression in the End times, humans' self-decided highness would never be met, much less challenged, by any other form of biological life.
However, things were changing, even if only slightly and slowly. There were movements in spiritual schools, scientific paradigms, and philosophical circles, regarding the critical need for all these disciplines to realize their interconnected importance in looking at the relationship between humans and animals. There had been a growing segregation between a scientific understanding of nature, and humans' empathic, personal connection to it. While science advanced the human world's knowledge of the nearly identical genetic identity of humans and the other higher primates; simultaneously the last remaining jungles inhabited by apes were being rapidly destroyed by a number of forces that could be directly attributed to human activity. It seemed the closer humans got to an intellectual understanding of the nearly-fatal damage they had imposed upon nature, the further they moved from recognizing the beauty of their own nature. This imposed an impending sense of guilt, and a lack of hope, both of which furthered the detriment. Unless humans learned to forgive themselves, their efforts at salvaging what remained of the pristine wilderness would be lost forever in the purgatory of the human heart's extinction.
While scientific knowledge was important, it alone was not enough to rescue the planet from its doomed condition. Salvation would be a matter of internal awareness and a reformed spiritual basis for action on the part of individuals.
* * *
Humans were certainly apt to care about themselves before they could care about other species of animals. This made sense. Because it was built into human biology - just as it was in the entire living world's biology - to care for oneself first, for others of the same species second, and for members of other species last (if at all). This was an evolutionary trend that ensured the survival of each species' genetic lineage, as long as that species’ particular genetic and morphological adaptations continued to work effectively in the constantly-changing landscape of nature's design.
However, many people were indeed beginning to fathom the depth of connection shared by all living beings by the time of the End. Besides the great apes, another order of animals was largely responsible for the growing human consciousness in those times. This was the order Cetacea, which included the whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Humans had begun seriously acting to save species that were endangered, or on the brink of absolute extinction. Much of the action in this direction revolved around species of animals with whom humans felt particularly connected. In other words, humans were more likely to care personally for a whale or a chimpanzee than for a moth or a rat. Partially, this had to do with the sheer numbers and rates of reproduction of specific animals. And also with the role they played in the ecospheric drama. It had to do with other factors, such as size; whether the animal was a mammal or not; and the “cuddly” factor. The cuter an animal was – the more its appearance tapped into humans’ particular likes or dislikes, needs or desires, fears or fantasies, or their “taste” in physical design and capacity for intelligence – the more likely humans were to pay attention to the plight of its species. Most of all, it seemed that the more “like” a human another animal was – the more closely a human could relate to another animal based on relative “sameness” – the greater the likelihood that humans would form an interest in saving that animal species.
Whether it committed the sin of anthropomorphism or not, humans looked to fellow animal societies for examples of behavior, both favorable and unfavorable by human standards, as models for comparison, and sometimes justification for actions. It made sense to note the social behavior of chimpanzees as a point of reference, being that humans and chimpanzees were first cousins on the family tree of Earth and God's progeny. It had been documented, late in the twentieth century, that chimpanzees had violent tendencies which included cannibalism and infanticide; and that within chimp society, neighboring clans waged war on one another.
Chimpanzee societies were based on a male-dominated hierarchy. Their power structure inevitably led to strongly defined roles of dominance and submission. In terms of male chimpanzees, sheer strength and brute force determined who would be able to impregnate the most females, and thus who would rule. An adult female chimpanzee's goal was to obtain proper nourishment for the health of herself and her offspring; and to maintain her boundaries of security, so as to ensure the safety of her young ones against invading predators.
It was never a sound statement on humans' part to put chimpanzees' lifestyle and behavior into a moral framework; the same framework within which human behavior could be defined and judged. It was never fair or sensible to project moral responsibility on any animals besides Homo sapiens. However, this did not stop people from doing just that. Humans often used examples of wild animal behavior to justify their own. For instance, humans could look at chimpanzee society, and claim that because it is in chimpanzees' nature to wage war on neighboring groups, that humans' actions of violence should be excused based on a "genetic predisposition" to aggression. Conversely, humans could look at the strong alliance between chimpanzee females, and the unshakable bond between mother and infant chimpanzees, and make the same claim for humans' genetic predisposition to loyalty, friendship, and biologically-ingrained love, between a mother an her offspring.
Humans could use these comparisons to show their immoral tendencies, or to the advantage of their image as divinely-inspired, good and righteous beings. Most often, their use was of the latter. Though these comparisons had no place in actuality, being that non-human animals were not, by the laws of God and Nature, indebted to a system of right-and-wrong; the act of reflecting upon the "self", based on comparisons to that which was "other", was the fundamental essence of the human consciousness. It seemed, though, that this human behavior, though perhaps used unjustly by humans who were unequipped with an appropriate understanding of the activity’s implications, may have been an evolutionary tool The Creator envisioned for reforming humans in a positive direction.
Humans' ability to choose the righteousness or wrongfulness of their actions, and thus their growth or deterioration as souls, was their most important adaptive endowment. It placed great responsibility upon individuals to make the right choices, and aspire to realize and manifest the goodness inherent within themselves, and in all of innocent nature. Ironically, the responsibility also involved humans' forgiveness, of themselves and all other animals, for the hedonistic, primal desires and indulgences that are just as inherent in nature as are selfless traits such as altruism.
The once rigid boundary confining humans to the absolute singularity of their-type consciousness was certainly becoming less of a small camp guarded defensively with big guns; and more of an opening zone of awareness. Research with chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity, was revealing astounding similarities between chimpanzee and human minds. The admittance on the part of humanity that chimpanzees even "had" minds, or were in any way sentient beings with feelings, thoughts, and individual personalities of their own, was an evolutionary breakthrough, sluggish in the coming. In the scope of geological time, the process of this paradigm shifting was merely a blip in the creative screen. However, relative to Homo sapiens' short history, the change was slow, but radical in nature. Such a change could have been none other than a radical one, considering how radically humans had altered the natural environment, and multiplied the numbers of extinction, within such a short period of time.
The most ground-breaking evidence of chimpanzees' likeness in consciousness to humans, was the discovery that chimpanzees could both comprehend, and manipulate, human language; and they did, so as to advance their own ability to communicate with human researchers and with one another. It seemed that chimpanzees' repertoire of behavior was likely a precursor to the more advanced "versions" and extensions of their behavior, those which exemplified human behavior.
Still, though it was accepted (by most) that chimpanzees had deep ways of feeling emotions of sadness, joy, pain, love, and everything in between; it was unacceptable to consider them beings of moral inclination, whose choices in reason would lead to complex actions with far-reaching and intricate implications. It seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that chimpanzees must have had some impending moral underpinnings in the brain; since so much of their other behavior and brain structure seemed to precede what had evolved as the human kind of moral mind. However, holding chimpanzees morally responsible for their actions, at that time, would have been both mindfully and morally ridiculous on the part of humans.
Rather than using their evolutionary precursors to justify their own “wrong” behavior in the present of their own lives, what humans needed to do was look to examples of behavior from a world completely foreign to their own. It seemed that their time on the land-locked plain, as bipedal mammals with an uncanny knack for fumbling on their feet, was waning. They needed to combine their own type and grade of intellect, with a lifestyle based more in cooperation than warfare; based more in the matriarchal pattern than the patriarchal one, which had governed their species into irreconcilable fighting and the continual fall of empires and societies over time. They needed to revoke the privileges of power that came with their kind of intelligence on land, be they tools of biotechnological grandeur, nuclear destruction capability, or simply ego-laden social systems, which allowed for suffering and oppression of the weak or helpless. Simply, they needed to take a drastic turn on their evolutionary path. And that move involved diving deep into the far, mysterious reaches of their own fear...and going for a long, hard, swim.
***
The scientific study of whales and dolphins in the late twenty-first century was in a vastly different context. Fundamentally, the context of land-living was of course vastly different than that of ocean-dwelling. Land and sea being two nearly opposite worlds, the human perception of intelligent sea creatures gave cetaceans a virtually alien quality. And for all intent and purposes, this was a truism. The ocean constituted inner space on the planet Earth. And while humans had spent considerable time, money, and efforts launching themselves into outer space for exploration, the ocean remained an almost pristine mystery.
Though scientists had studied many oceanic life forms and understood something of their life cycles, anatomy and physiology, and unique behavioral repertoire, only the surface waters had been waived. While the world ocean accounted for 75% of the entire planet's surface area, humans had only begun to peek beyond the shallows. The deep sea was sometimes referred to as the Midnight Zone. This layer of ocean, where no sunlight can penetrate and photosynthesis lies dormant in the shadows, begins at the depth of 600 feet; and descends to the ocean floor which, at its deepest, lies some 14,000 feet down at the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. All the seawater contained in this layer accounts for 95% of the entire planet's oceans. And by the End of their land-dwelling days, humans had explored a mere 1% of these dark depths.
The human body was simply not equipped, even with the finest in diving and submersible technology, to go down so deep for any length of time. And in the metaphorical sense, the human mind was not yet equipped for the discovery of what lay so far below the surface, of water and of their own skin. The intricacy of gravity-defiant living; the delicate beauty and bizarre ways of inner space's alien life...the utter void of vast ocean space, where lines of time and incisions to divide were completely obsolete. The End times were times of spiritual desperation, and simultaneously preparation, for what lie in wait for the faithful.
In the metaphor likening the human "heart" to the sea, humans were still very much afraid. Of the power and pressure at depth; of the utterly frightening faces of emotional states in their purity, uncut and unblocked by defenses or barriers; of the absolute pain evoked by the ocean, Earthly manifestation of God in form, being absolute beauty, and thus completing the circle of biological, physical, and chemical existence. The ocean was so big. So endlessly vast; wide and deep and all-encompassing beyond mental comprehension. Humans were afraid. Standing on the shore, they peered out over an unlimited horizon, into the faceless face of the original cradle, Mother and Father. The inevitable grave of every last breath; every cell's decomposition, sunken into soil, risen as clouds, and fallen again. Again and forever again, the sea. Birth and death place for every last drop of water. Every fallen tear.
But from the mystery of the ocean itself came humans inspiration to learn and grow, not only physically and mentally, but spiritually. And this transformation began happening through humans' emotional connection to ocean's greatest intelligence...the cetaceans.
Humans felt deeply connected with these beautiful beasts, though it took millions of years for them to really understand why. As they would grow to find out, cetaceans represented the other-worldly future of humans' becoming. In the truly nonlinear, shapeless dimensions of evolutionary progression, humans were returning to the sea, where their destructive lifestyle could sink; and the true intentions of goodness -- inherent within humans just as much as the mistakes of wrong action -- could rise above...and float.
***
The twenty first century found Earth broken under pressure and shifting its weight in anticipation for the sixth mass extinction, letting water pour in and fill up all space, making the tips of the tallest mountains the surface area of the smallest islands. And humans were faced with an inevitability reminiscent of that preceding their species' exit from the sea the first time. As beings who had choices, but were also fated in the direction of aquatic evolution, the choices they had made throughout their time on earth had brought them to this End. Their violent institutions drowned, and thus they were left to realize their humble beauty where always it had been suitable, but was continually overlooked by ego. Now they floated on the very tangible brink of a second chance, granted them by the very forgiving Mother, and fostered by the mighty whales who had much to teach them about a way of life that was functional, cooperative, and in support of a continuing planet. It was a new beginning for the human species, who were now eager to learn and become more than human.
So they situated themselves within this foreign tribe of sea mammals to be raised and grow smoothly into its traditions, as Tarzan had done with his family of apes in the jungle. As "spiritual infants" with room to develop the art of living simply, peacefully, and truthfully, they accepted the ways of the whales as "enlightened", and rose to meet new standards. Eventually they would come to know pure existence with no analysis or judgement. They would know swiftness in moving with the rhythm of life cycles. They would know sailing with ease through every moment, to erase lines marking time. They would operate with precise technology in the mind, so intricate that computers, by comparison, would seem primitive in their abilities. They would gain an understanding of life's structure deep beyond the translation of the human language. Those queries about "meaning" would now become obsolete in the shadow of a life lived, rather than questioned.
In order to reach this level of being, humans had to be modified physiologically, the architecture of their frames streamlined to make them efficient water vessels. Then their brains and hearts would be able to grow into their new bodies. They already had the basics accounted for, and due to the time spent underwater in their evolutionary past, the rest was transformed without much difficulty.
Humans had tails in the womb. They had fish-like gill slits, a notochord that turned into a backbone. Their eyes started on the sides of their head pre-birth, and moved to the front gradually. Their body fluids met the needs of body cells and germ cells for a water environment. The arrangement of human hairs followed precisely the lines that would be followed by the flow of water over a swimming body. They possessed the mechanism of bardycardia, which makes the metabolic processes slow down, slows down the heartbeat, and reduces the body's consumption of oxygen. This allowed them to dive and hold their breaths for long periods of time without running out of oxygen as quickly as a land mammal would. Humans also developed a layer of subcutaneous fat, analogous to whales' blubber, over the surface of their bodies. Humans already had two pectoral breasts, which are characteristic of the sirenian, or sea cow, a rare class of animals who had been called the "original mermaids".
Humans cried, and crying is an aquatic acquirement. They had the same highly developed, paired nasal glands as marine mammals, through which saline flowed.
Still, humans had profound changes yet to endure. They had to give up feet for flukes and arms for flippers. They had to learn from whales, how to be more like them in every way.
First the human brain would be progressively enlarged to several times its original size. This enhanced the neural mechanisms of the human brain to suit a very complex sonar perceptual system. Human speech had been attributed to the size of their brains before the flood, so with the increase in brain size, coupled with the acoustic playing field created by water, their ability to communicate reached even greater depths. They learned to perceive images with reverberations from their own sounds, learned to sing graces that reached across the entire world in miles, learned to read the emotional states of other animals, and become sensitive to them.
Learning from whales, humans did not revert to a mere system of "reward and punishment", as whales and dolphins had been forced to do when held captive by humans in the 19th and 20th centuries. To the ultimate contrary, they were given the opportunity to use the vocal channel of communication which had begun to evolve during their previous years in the primordial ocean, and rather than using it to continue speaking words that harmed one another and lacked the capacity to describe all of life's truly indescribable beauties, they instead advanced to learn the complex lingual structure of cetaceans. This involved specialized clicks and whistles, quacks and wails, and song, both sonic and supersonic. They learned to abort insults, and all motivation behind blind arguments. Now they spoke, or more appropriately sang, from a place of peace.
They developed sharp echolocation abilities and were soon able to emit short pulses of sound at ranges up to 200,000 hertz at a rate of 10 to 200 per second. With echolocation, humans gained whales' and dolphins' equivalent of an x-ray view of the ocean and were able to identify prey by its living skeleton and beating pulse, in murky water or at night. Their brains gained magnetic impulses to help them navigate across hundreds of miles of ocean per day and follow a global magnetic map spread throughout the natural landscape of the ocean floor. Their sense of smell diminished, their skulls elongated, and soon they could propel themselves gracefully through water using the highly efficient perpendicular stroke of their muscular tail flukes.
Once human bodies changed shape and brains grew considerably larger, the whales -- without preaching in any language but for the simple example of how they lived their own lives -- began lessons in social graces, teaching humans how to coexist peacefully within families and communities, and across the boundaries of species. They would learn that, in the sea, boundaries were erased because liquid was no foundation for building walls. It was no longer a world of solid barriers, borders, or permanence declared by those afraid of their impermanence. There was no imposition on nature. Nothing existed here but the natural world, and humans were finally among nature, rather than towering above it wearing the diminishing stone skin of superior statues. This water world was see-through, nothing hidden, nothing oppressed. Things were finally fluid and able to move and alter themselves at the will of the dynamic life force. It was a habitat conducive to a kind of life that humans never imagined could exist, and couldn't have been attained but by the miracle of the tides...changing.
***
The old ways of humans had been deadly. By the grace of the Father and the unconditional forgiveness of the Mother, they were given the opportunity to choose a better life. It was time for humans to live up to the honor with which they were trusted after ensuing so much damage. With the whales as teachers, humans grew into their giant-ness; their souls eventually filled their bodies and spilled from them. Through being forgiven, they learned to forgive themselves and ultimately forgot anger, vengeance, and pain. They learned to flow with life rather than fighting against its revolving, leaving no more rude imprints on the earth's fragile skin. With no more feet for anguished trudging, they soon began to pass over land without the weighted struggle of tired legs. Humans began using the wisdom for which they had always had potential. They had known great love in their hearts; and it was only the unfortunate monster of advances overrunning logic, logic overrunning the reality of emotional depth, that clouded humans' perceptions of what was innately important. It was a cycle that grew monotonous. And simply had to come to an End...
***
And in the spirit of every crashing wave’s revolution, the End gave way to The Beginning...of the next great evolution.
In fact, we bet our lives we wouldn't see the last day. But because of this blind eye we turned to consequence, the chain connecting our fragile, diminishing web of life broke. One link swallowed the next; and our precious structures crumbled, leaving us reaching from underneath the rubble of crushed illusions, our hands raised to Heaven seeking help. Finally.
Do you remember the awful sound it made?
It was the sound of a back breaking; a step on a crack. It was the last man standing. It was the slip of an Almighty finger that propped a living, teetering, spinning globe on its tip. Support corroded at the base; the crack spread, and the ball fell from grace. Strained to maximum capacity, Earth sucked in Her gut once more, and all Hell broke loose in Her abdomen. With the world knocked off its hinges, and its weight sent fumbling into darkness, life's systems swirled and spun like no other circus ride.
The Fat Lady pursed her lips, sucked every last ounce of atmospheric oxygen into her diaphragm through her toes, and to the increasingly loud rumble of an approaching drum, released the killer symphony that had been stifled in her stomach since humanity’s creation of the myth. With her song, plates shifted, and the thunderous roar of the world's disregard for what was coming saturated the air across the universe. The chill from her breath was so cruel that the roots of the underworld shivered and grew crisp like the grass of a morning nearing winter.
Hell froze over.
And the hot liquid magma in the belly of Earth swelled and hardened like a giant red snow cone; an ulcer of fire and ice. Pigs up and flew, becoming pink tornadoes in the sky of false presumption. A genie granting humans their death wish huffed and puffed and lit millions of acres of forest on fire. Warm ocean waters grew cold. Newborn's howled at the state of the world and prayed for a return trip through the birth canal. Mountains eroded, adding aged layers of silty parfait to geological document. Volcanoes spewed heaving last breaths and the ground swallowed fire and coughed ashes.
Nature's order was in complete disarray. Taxonomic identifications and chemical equations would be obsolete within the coming age, which was crashing like a tidal wave and caving in on Time. The internal clash of fire and ice in the stomach of Earth caused Her foundation to spring leaks; the fire melted the ice, and the land began to flood.
Cars, in their armor, refused to float and became sunken treasures at the bottom of the unifying sea. City buildings became miniatures in a giant living aquarium. Water-logged computer systems went haywire, lights shut off, data was lost, history books formed fossils, and files were erased, discontinuing social security-coined identities and washing clocks and calendars under the riptide of all of history.
People frantically hurried to the top floors of sky-scrapers, the turrets of churches and mosques, the attics of multi-story houses, pleading desperate prayers to any God in the red sky above that might listen. Despite their last-minute pleas, another era spilled back into the ocean where all began; where all end...where all begins.
***
Humans kicked like babies thrown in at birth. Humility saturated their gurgled cries as they went under, and with assurance of their remorse, God let out a moan, low and deep in the sea, where the water pressure carried sound in concentrated form until it reached into the heart of every water droplet and made it sing. The melody, recognized as both an alarm and a rejoicing, sent troops of earth angels to begin rescue.
Chosen, and subsequently biologically endowed, for this mission were the grand masters of pelagic life; the mystical giants of perfect propulsion through time and trend; the biggest bodies and biggest brains of all time; The Great Whales.
In the years preceding this event in human history, whales and dolphins had used their posts in captivity, or in otherwise close proximity to humans, as the context for practicing as ambassadors. Representatives of several species had been liaisons between the wet and dry worlds, to observe and study the ways of human behavior, and to motivate the spiritual direction of human evolution. At the dawning of this new era, God knew that, although humanity at large was battling a destructive force threatening to overcome its collective will, those humans who chose to save themselves most certainly could. It would simply be a matter of surrender, and a knocking-loose of the individual will from complacency.
Humans were still adaptable, and thus were considered a species fit to survive, given adjustments to their immediate geophysical environment, their accessibility to natural resources, and their reliance upon them for energy and power. And to mental and spiritual hindrances, like the seemingly inherent pronation toward aggression in the human brain, which led to a sense of inner conflict that caused self-dissatisfaction and external destruction, from inside the individual, out. It was from the trough of this turmoil within, that greed and hedonism could feed. And did, until the plate was nearly clean, and itself, devoured nearly beyond recognition.
God had in store, though, for those who chose goodness, rebirth into a home in the solace of Mother Sea's tranquil belly. With Her nurturing to soothe those troubled souls, and quiet those self-deprecating voices of hopelessness, God had faith in humans' living on.
***
As the terrified humans flailed and wailed for mercy, the rescue mission began from the depths. The humans who had given up hope by The End had simply resisted the struggle; let the water pour in, and surrendered, not to the eternal wake of belief, but to the dark Finality. Those with faith waited patiently in their places, treading water. They were fueled by the strength of something bigger than themselves.
From the deepest caverns of ocean's mystery, the great whales rose up to meet the challenge of earth’s interdependent destiny. Their responsibility was to assist in redirecting history, at the interface between human and non-human intelligence.
***
The humpbacks fired forth, singing gospel that echoed through the pulpits of choral reef until they vibrated. Bowheads speared up from Alaska and the Chuckchi Sea in small but quick packs. Herds of northern and southern right whales jetted up from Argentina and the Bay of Fundy, carrying hitch-hiking callosities that colored them like speeding tulip bouquets. North Atlantic pilots flew at supersonic speed like super heroes to the scene. Bottlenose and spotted dolphins caught the ride of each other's wake, galloping across water tops at 50 nauts. Sperm whales, each weighing multiple tons, shot like bottle rockets from Soviet waters. Beaked whales from South Africa and New Zealand, spectacled porpoises from Tierra Del Fuego, Bristol Bay belugas, and the sleek, gargantuan blues, biggest animals ever to exist, drilled toward the surface like a synchronized fleet of steadily-breathing submarines. The leaders of the revolution, charging in from all parts of the world, were the orcas, whose striking black and white embodied the purity and salvation of balance and harmony.
All the whales in the world shot skyward into epiphany. The white water trails behind them, the diversified colors of ambition pointed out from every fascicle at the core, turned the earth into a supreme firework in mid-burst. With the entire cetacean nation's participation in the collective effort to save the humans, the shuddering earth sputtered to a lull, then halted at once. The height of chaos subsided, and all was calm and quiet.
***
While the exhausted humans began sinking, despite their small bodies' concerted efforts to survive, a whale positioned itself underneath each one of them and pushed their tiny selves to the surface. All creatures breathed at once, at first gasping, then deeply sighing with relief for the stillness that finally hushed the waters. Those humans still alive opened their clenched-shut eyes. They were surprised to find themselves, not in the purgatory of the next mass extinction; but in the rubble-studded aftermath of a tremendous awakening. And resting peacefully on the unbreakable back of forgiveness.
Humans realized they could feed off of the earth’s forgiveness of them, and use their resulting store of strength in forgiving themselves and their own species, where guilt had nearly eaten them hungry before the flood. The planet idled softly, the sun and moon fizzled on weary bulbs. In their spirit as altruistic animals, the whales remained in place assisting humans at the surface, until humans developed the capacity to traverse the water world with the grace and ease of their saviors. Eventually, humans would learn to swim of their own evolving will.
***
Humans spent the next several million years growing accustomed to life in the sea. Drawing from fossilized memories embedded deep within the DNA of their ancestral lineage, humans changed shape to meet the demands of water life. Saltwater was not a completely foreign medium to the human race. In fact it was familiar, within the cellular storage of life's origin, to all animal races. This made gaining efficiency and adaptive fitness in this new environment a matter of remembrance; and a newfound, profound reverence for the blessing of life.
An epic sort of deja vu shed a dim but identifiable light on humans' past, as the race had evolved through time in ways very similar to Earth and all other organisms. Fundamentally, those humans who were willing to learn were reduced to their humble beginnings. And in their evolution from The End forward, their progress imitated that of the very first unicellular being to emerge from the sea some four and a half billion years prior.
From as deep as the ocean within every biological existent, in some ancient, divine code, is a remembrance of life before life began. Fathoms below unfathomable depth, lies the original idea behind Supreme Creativity. Woven between every dancing molecule in the fluid matrix of biological design, lives the primitive recipe for birth. The most remote of any memory brings the universe and its every being back 42 billion years into the past, when a series of cataclysmic supernovas and a fizz of exploding stars found their way into the solar system. It wouldn't be until some 30 billion years forward on the time line of Nothingness, that matter would emerge to eventually facilitate Everything.
Humans remembered that their own DNA was compatible with that of the bacteria that initiated photosynthesis over 570 million years earlier, thus giving rise to oxygen and making life outside of saltwater possible. The first cells thrived in the sea's store of organic molecules; complex carbon was the spinach that built cells into beings. And from the beginning, there was an outstanding degree of uniformity among all living things. All cells were created equal, all cells had the same molecular symmetry, all proteins were made from the same miniature ribosomes. All of us, in our depths, were simply genetic codes; strands marked with the collision of egg and sperm, some complex chemistry, and the master plan for biologically-conjoined existence. From a glowing ball of cells in the water, tissues formed an ancient invertebrate enveloped in a sac of fluid similar to the primeval seas. Masses of cells first made an embryo, then a fetus. And eventually, the first newborn was birthed of virgin water.
Humans remembered their long-standing likeness to the free-swimming sea squirt, whose primitive spinal cord gave it the title of 'first vertebrate', ancestral parent to all the rest. Humans remembered their ancestors' course through oceans' amniotic estuaries before a violent birth out of liquid, onto calloused feet to walk the land as bipedal primates.
They remembered that Eve was a mermaid, and Adam a land-man, trying to grow back the fins he wore as a fish in the womb...living only for his return to absolute Love.
Long before humans were human, their genetics' intuition heeded the warning that land was dangerous, and water was better. Land was barren, forbidding, and exposed to ultra-violet light. It wasn't until enough oxygen blanketed the earth, creating the ozone layer, that there was protection enough for animals to venture out and dry off. Land was harsh. Animals had to learn to store liquid in their bodies so they wouldn't die of thirst. Eggs needed more protection on land. Cold and heat were extreme. And gravity required strong bones for support. Animals had to either adapt or perish. Being free-willed mortals in the making, humans made their first collective "choice" as a species and grew legs, despite the warnings of the physical world.
Once returned to the sea, Humans began to develop physical characteristics to aid their success as swimming apes. They had already been progressing in this fated direction for millions of years, evident in the fact that they had shed their heavy coats of fur, becoming naked apes, for more efficient swimming. Just as the hippo had turned into a naked ungulate, the walrus a naked pinniped, and the porpoise a naked cetacean, humans became naked again, like infants, open and vulnerable to the harsh conditions of spiritual learning.
They went from eating meat, fruits and vegetables to eating shrimp and baby crab; edible sea weed, kelp, and moss for vitamin content. As years passed and adaptations enhanced to meet a changing environment, the humans' legs dwindled to vestigial size and moved farther apart, eventually becoming flippers.
Humans were truly changing, growing out of the restrictions that had plagued their species for so long. It was by the omnipotent direction of Father God and the Nurturing guidance of Mother Sea, that humans would grow into bodies and brains the size of the whales'.
***
In retrospect, humans' great detraction from animal enlightenment in the twenty first century seemed an imminent regression. From the time Homo sapiens split off most recently from the rest of the great ape family, their brains had grown bigger, and life had progressed with the advance of technology in mind. Humans had gained the ability to stand on two legs rather than four. This lengthened and straightened the spine, which allowed for the vocal cords to morph into a shape conducive to forming verbal language. In the meantime, their opposable-thumb-equipped hands were freed up for holding, throwing, and even fashioning tools and weapons. It had been deduced, in anthropological study in the End times, that the same part of the brain responsible for the hands' fine motor control was also responsible for speech. This explained why humans acquired language once they began exercising the use of their hands to a greater and more intricate extent.
As humans became more agile and dexterous in forming rocks and bone into weapons and tools, their perception – and evolving consciousness - took on a more sequential structure. Their understanding of the three-dimensional world became more linear, as their mental processes led them through the foresight and follow-through of willed activities, uni-directionally, across the line of time.
Eventually, after a trek across millions of years in Earth's history, this type of biological progress would lead to the creativity and intellectualism of the End times. Humans had produced a world of great speed and technological efficiency. And were also responsible for the creation of many beautiful works of art, inspired by the capacity of the human Self as Divine muse. However, an evolving brain that continued progressing in design toward the likes of either an emotionless super-computer, or an overly emotional smoldering coal, (at its extremes), was in dire need of "returning" (or advancing) to its more simultaneous and unified way of functioning.
While humans in a few parts of the world were rich and powerful by means of a monetary system of exchange, most humans were struggling to survive in oppressive social, economic, and political systems. A couple of nations had become the all-powerful overseers of the rest of the world's well-being, and were not taking on the vast ethical responsibility necessary to claim such a dictatorial position. Not only did the oppressive dynamic cage people into hopeless situations, destroying spirits and birthing more and more generations of slaves; it also wreaked havoc over the entire Earthly ecosystem, holding It the ultimate prisoner of human conscience.
Humans, on the whole, had appointed themselves to be the dominant force, important and superior over all other living creatures. The collective human philosophy supported the idea of a "ladder of worth", upon which humans sat atop the highest rung. The brains that had advanced further into this format of linear abstraction placed a living being's worth, at first, on how intelligent it was according to human standards and a human definition of intelligence. And eventually, the scale became a delusional metaphor for humans' self-possessed egos, isolated in a chamber of greed and selfishness, outside of which existed life that differed from other life only by degrees of separation from human "perfection".
Most humans considered their own species superior by a massive number of degrees. It had become apparent, that in the stagnant state of intellectual and spiritual progression in the End times, humans' self-decided highness would never be met, much less challenged, by any other form of biological life.
However, things were changing, even if only slightly and slowly. There were movements in spiritual schools, scientific paradigms, and philosophical circles, regarding the critical need for all these disciplines to realize their interconnected importance in looking at the relationship between humans and animals. There had been a growing segregation between a scientific understanding of nature, and humans' empathic, personal connection to it. While science advanced the human world's knowledge of the nearly identical genetic identity of humans and the other higher primates; simultaneously the last remaining jungles inhabited by apes were being rapidly destroyed by a number of forces that could be directly attributed to human activity. It seemed the closer humans got to an intellectual understanding of the nearly-fatal damage they had imposed upon nature, the further they moved from recognizing the beauty of their own nature. This imposed an impending sense of guilt, and a lack of hope, both of which furthered the detriment. Unless humans learned to forgive themselves, their efforts at salvaging what remained of the pristine wilderness would be lost forever in the purgatory of the human heart's extinction.
While scientific knowledge was important, it alone was not enough to rescue the planet from its doomed condition. Salvation would be a matter of internal awareness and a reformed spiritual basis for action on the part of individuals.
* * *
Humans were certainly apt to care about themselves before they could care about other species of animals. This made sense. Because it was built into human biology - just as it was in the entire living world's biology - to care for oneself first, for others of the same species second, and for members of other species last (if at all). This was an evolutionary trend that ensured the survival of each species' genetic lineage, as long as that species’ particular genetic and morphological adaptations continued to work effectively in the constantly-changing landscape of nature's design.
However, many people were indeed beginning to fathom the depth of connection shared by all living beings by the time of the End. Besides the great apes, another order of animals was largely responsible for the growing human consciousness in those times. This was the order Cetacea, which included the whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Humans had begun seriously acting to save species that were endangered, or on the brink of absolute extinction. Much of the action in this direction revolved around species of animals with whom humans felt particularly connected. In other words, humans were more likely to care personally for a whale or a chimpanzee than for a moth or a rat. Partially, this had to do with the sheer numbers and rates of reproduction of specific animals. And also with the role they played in the ecospheric drama. It had to do with other factors, such as size; whether the animal was a mammal or not; and the “cuddly” factor. The cuter an animal was – the more its appearance tapped into humans’ particular likes or dislikes, needs or desires, fears or fantasies, or their “taste” in physical design and capacity for intelligence – the more likely humans were to pay attention to the plight of its species. Most of all, it seemed that the more “like” a human another animal was – the more closely a human could relate to another animal based on relative “sameness” – the greater the likelihood that humans would form an interest in saving that animal species.
Whether it committed the sin of anthropomorphism or not, humans looked to fellow animal societies for examples of behavior, both favorable and unfavorable by human standards, as models for comparison, and sometimes justification for actions. It made sense to note the social behavior of chimpanzees as a point of reference, being that humans and chimpanzees were first cousins on the family tree of Earth and God's progeny. It had been documented, late in the twentieth century, that chimpanzees had violent tendencies which included cannibalism and infanticide; and that within chimp society, neighboring clans waged war on one another.
Chimpanzee societies were based on a male-dominated hierarchy. Their power structure inevitably led to strongly defined roles of dominance and submission. In terms of male chimpanzees, sheer strength and brute force determined who would be able to impregnate the most females, and thus who would rule. An adult female chimpanzee's goal was to obtain proper nourishment for the health of herself and her offspring; and to maintain her boundaries of security, so as to ensure the safety of her young ones against invading predators.
It was never a sound statement on humans' part to put chimpanzees' lifestyle and behavior into a moral framework; the same framework within which human behavior could be defined and judged. It was never fair or sensible to project moral responsibility on any animals besides Homo sapiens. However, this did not stop people from doing just that. Humans often used examples of wild animal behavior to justify their own. For instance, humans could look at chimpanzee society, and claim that because it is in chimpanzees' nature to wage war on neighboring groups, that humans' actions of violence should be excused based on a "genetic predisposition" to aggression. Conversely, humans could look at the strong alliance between chimpanzee females, and the unshakable bond between mother and infant chimpanzees, and make the same claim for humans' genetic predisposition to loyalty, friendship, and biologically-ingrained love, between a mother an her offspring.
Humans could use these comparisons to show their immoral tendencies, or to the advantage of their image as divinely-inspired, good and righteous beings. Most often, their use was of the latter. Though these comparisons had no place in actuality, being that non-human animals were not, by the laws of God and Nature, indebted to a system of right-and-wrong; the act of reflecting upon the "self", based on comparisons to that which was "other", was the fundamental essence of the human consciousness. It seemed, though, that this human behavior, though perhaps used unjustly by humans who were unequipped with an appropriate understanding of the activity’s implications, may have been an evolutionary tool The Creator envisioned for reforming humans in a positive direction.
Humans' ability to choose the righteousness or wrongfulness of their actions, and thus their growth or deterioration as souls, was their most important adaptive endowment. It placed great responsibility upon individuals to make the right choices, and aspire to realize and manifest the goodness inherent within themselves, and in all of innocent nature. Ironically, the responsibility also involved humans' forgiveness, of themselves and all other animals, for the hedonistic, primal desires and indulgences that are just as inherent in nature as are selfless traits such as altruism.
The once rigid boundary confining humans to the absolute singularity of their-type consciousness was certainly becoming less of a small camp guarded defensively with big guns; and more of an opening zone of awareness. Research with chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity, was revealing astounding similarities between chimpanzee and human minds. The admittance on the part of humanity that chimpanzees even "had" minds, or were in any way sentient beings with feelings, thoughts, and individual personalities of their own, was an evolutionary breakthrough, sluggish in the coming. In the scope of geological time, the process of this paradigm shifting was merely a blip in the creative screen. However, relative to Homo sapiens' short history, the change was slow, but radical in nature. Such a change could have been none other than a radical one, considering how radically humans had altered the natural environment, and multiplied the numbers of extinction, within such a short period of time.
The most ground-breaking evidence of chimpanzees' likeness in consciousness to humans, was the discovery that chimpanzees could both comprehend, and manipulate, human language; and they did, so as to advance their own ability to communicate with human researchers and with one another. It seemed that chimpanzees' repertoire of behavior was likely a precursor to the more advanced "versions" and extensions of their behavior, those which exemplified human behavior.
Still, though it was accepted (by most) that chimpanzees had deep ways of feeling emotions of sadness, joy, pain, love, and everything in between; it was unacceptable to consider them beings of moral inclination, whose choices in reason would lead to complex actions with far-reaching and intricate implications. It seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that chimpanzees must have had some impending moral underpinnings in the brain; since so much of their other behavior and brain structure seemed to precede what had evolved as the human kind of moral mind. However, holding chimpanzees morally responsible for their actions, at that time, would have been both mindfully and morally ridiculous on the part of humans.
Rather than using their evolutionary precursors to justify their own “wrong” behavior in the present of their own lives, what humans needed to do was look to examples of behavior from a world completely foreign to their own. It seemed that their time on the land-locked plain, as bipedal mammals with an uncanny knack for fumbling on their feet, was waning. They needed to combine their own type and grade of intellect, with a lifestyle based more in cooperation than warfare; based more in the matriarchal pattern than the patriarchal one, which had governed their species into irreconcilable fighting and the continual fall of empires and societies over time. They needed to revoke the privileges of power that came with their kind of intelligence on land, be they tools of biotechnological grandeur, nuclear destruction capability, or simply ego-laden social systems, which allowed for suffering and oppression of the weak or helpless. Simply, they needed to take a drastic turn on their evolutionary path. And that move involved diving deep into the far, mysterious reaches of their own fear...and going for a long, hard, swim.
***
The scientific study of whales and dolphins in the late twenty-first century was in a vastly different context. Fundamentally, the context of land-living was of course vastly different than that of ocean-dwelling. Land and sea being two nearly opposite worlds, the human perception of intelligent sea creatures gave cetaceans a virtually alien quality. And for all intent and purposes, this was a truism. The ocean constituted inner space on the planet Earth. And while humans had spent considerable time, money, and efforts launching themselves into outer space for exploration, the ocean remained an almost pristine mystery.
Though scientists had studied many oceanic life forms and understood something of their life cycles, anatomy and physiology, and unique behavioral repertoire, only the surface waters had been waived. While the world ocean accounted for 75% of the entire planet's surface area, humans had only begun to peek beyond the shallows. The deep sea was sometimes referred to as the Midnight Zone. This layer of ocean, where no sunlight can penetrate and photosynthesis lies dormant in the shadows, begins at the depth of 600 feet; and descends to the ocean floor which, at its deepest, lies some 14,000 feet down at the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. All the seawater contained in this layer accounts for 95% of the entire planet's oceans. And by the End of their land-dwelling days, humans had explored a mere 1% of these dark depths.
The human body was simply not equipped, even with the finest in diving and submersible technology, to go down so deep for any length of time. And in the metaphorical sense, the human mind was not yet equipped for the discovery of what lay so far below the surface, of water and of their own skin. The intricacy of gravity-defiant living; the delicate beauty and bizarre ways of inner space's alien life...the utter void of vast ocean space, where lines of time and incisions to divide were completely obsolete. The End times were times of spiritual desperation, and simultaneously preparation, for what lie in wait for the faithful.
In the metaphor likening the human "heart" to the sea, humans were still very much afraid. Of the power and pressure at depth; of the utterly frightening faces of emotional states in their purity, uncut and unblocked by defenses or barriers; of the absolute pain evoked by the ocean, Earthly manifestation of God in form, being absolute beauty, and thus completing the circle of biological, physical, and chemical existence. The ocean was so big. So endlessly vast; wide and deep and all-encompassing beyond mental comprehension. Humans were afraid. Standing on the shore, they peered out over an unlimited horizon, into the faceless face of the original cradle, Mother and Father. The inevitable grave of every last breath; every cell's decomposition, sunken into soil, risen as clouds, and fallen again. Again and forever again, the sea. Birth and death place for every last drop of water. Every fallen tear.
But from the mystery of the ocean itself came humans inspiration to learn and grow, not only physically and mentally, but spiritually. And this transformation began happening through humans' emotional connection to ocean's greatest intelligence...the cetaceans.
Humans felt deeply connected with these beautiful beasts, though it took millions of years for them to really understand why. As they would grow to find out, cetaceans represented the other-worldly future of humans' becoming. In the truly nonlinear, shapeless dimensions of evolutionary progression, humans were returning to the sea, where their destructive lifestyle could sink; and the true intentions of goodness -- inherent within humans just as much as the mistakes of wrong action -- could rise above...and float.
***
The twenty first century found Earth broken under pressure and shifting its weight in anticipation for the sixth mass extinction, letting water pour in and fill up all space, making the tips of the tallest mountains the surface area of the smallest islands. And humans were faced with an inevitability reminiscent of that preceding their species' exit from the sea the first time. As beings who had choices, but were also fated in the direction of aquatic evolution, the choices they had made throughout their time on earth had brought them to this End. Their violent institutions drowned, and thus they were left to realize their humble beauty where always it had been suitable, but was continually overlooked by ego. Now they floated on the very tangible brink of a second chance, granted them by the very forgiving Mother, and fostered by the mighty whales who had much to teach them about a way of life that was functional, cooperative, and in support of a continuing planet. It was a new beginning for the human species, who were now eager to learn and become more than human.
So they situated themselves within this foreign tribe of sea mammals to be raised and grow smoothly into its traditions, as Tarzan had done with his family of apes in the jungle. As "spiritual infants" with room to develop the art of living simply, peacefully, and truthfully, they accepted the ways of the whales as "enlightened", and rose to meet new standards. Eventually they would come to know pure existence with no analysis or judgement. They would know swiftness in moving with the rhythm of life cycles. They would know sailing with ease through every moment, to erase lines marking time. They would operate with precise technology in the mind, so intricate that computers, by comparison, would seem primitive in their abilities. They would gain an understanding of life's structure deep beyond the translation of the human language. Those queries about "meaning" would now become obsolete in the shadow of a life lived, rather than questioned.
In order to reach this level of being, humans had to be modified physiologically, the architecture of their frames streamlined to make them efficient water vessels. Then their brains and hearts would be able to grow into their new bodies. They already had the basics accounted for, and due to the time spent underwater in their evolutionary past, the rest was transformed without much difficulty.
Humans had tails in the womb. They had fish-like gill slits, a notochord that turned into a backbone. Their eyes started on the sides of their head pre-birth, and moved to the front gradually. Their body fluids met the needs of body cells and germ cells for a water environment. The arrangement of human hairs followed precisely the lines that would be followed by the flow of water over a swimming body. They possessed the mechanism of bardycardia, which makes the metabolic processes slow down, slows down the heartbeat, and reduces the body's consumption of oxygen. This allowed them to dive and hold their breaths for long periods of time without running out of oxygen as quickly as a land mammal would. Humans also developed a layer of subcutaneous fat, analogous to whales' blubber, over the surface of their bodies. Humans already had two pectoral breasts, which are characteristic of the sirenian, or sea cow, a rare class of animals who had been called the "original mermaids".
Humans cried, and crying is an aquatic acquirement. They had the same highly developed, paired nasal glands as marine mammals, through which saline flowed.
Still, humans had profound changes yet to endure. They had to give up feet for flukes and arms for flippers. They had to learn from whales, how to be more like them in every way.
First the human brain would be progressively enlarged to several times its original size. This enhanced the neural mechanisms of the human brain to suit a very complex sonar perceptual system. Human speech had been attributed to the size of their brains before the flood, so with the increase in brain size, coupled with the acoustic playing field created by water, their ability to communicate reached even greater depths. They learned to perceive images with reverberations from their own sounds, learned to sing graces that reached across the entire world in miles, learned to read the emotional states of other animals, and become sensitive to them.
Learning from whales, humans did not revert to a mere system of "reward and punishment", as whales and dolphins had been forced to do when held captive by humans in the 19th and 20th centuries. To the ultimate contrary, they were given the opportunity to use the vocal channel of communication which had begun to evolve during their previous years in the primordial ocean, and rather than using it to continue speaking words that harmed one another and lacked the capacity to describe all of life's truly indescribable beauties, they instead advanced to learn the complex lingual structure of cetaceans. This involved specialized clicks and whistles, quacks and wails, and song, both sonic and supersonic. They learned to abort insults, and all motivation behind blind arguments. Now they spoke, or more appropriately sang, from a place of peace.
They developed sharp echolocation abilities and were soon able to emit short pulses of sound at ranges up to 200,000 hertz at a rate of 10 to 200 per second. With echolocation, humans gained whales' and dolphins' equivalent of an x-ray view of the ocean and were able to identify prey by its living skeleton and beating pulse, in murky water or at night. Their brains gained magnetic impulses to help them navigate across hundreds of miles of ocean per day and follow a global magnetic map spread throughout the natural landscape of the ocean floor. Their sense of smell diminished, their skulls elongated, and soon they could propel themselves gracefully through water using the highly efficient perpendicular stroke of their muscular tail flukes.
Once human bodies changed shape and brains grew considerably larger, the whales -- without preaching in any language but for the simple example of how they lived their own lives -- began lessons in social graces, teaching humans how to coexist peacefully within families and communities, and across the boundaries of species. They would learn that, in the sea, boundaries were erased because liquid was no foundation for building walls. It was no longer a world of solid barriers, borders, or permanence declared by those afraid of their impermanence. There was no imposition on nature. Nothing existed here but the natural world, and humans were finally among nature, rather than towering above it wearing the diminishing stone skin of superior statues. This water world was see-through, nothing hidden, nothing oppressed. Things were finally fluid and able to move and alter themselves at the will of the dynamic life force. It was a habitat conducive to a kind of life that humans never imagined could exist, and couldn't have been attained but by the miracle of the tides...changing.
***
The old ways of humans had been deadly. By the grace of the Father and the unconditional forgiveness of the Mother, they were given the opportunity to choose a better life. It was time for humans to live up to the honor with which they were trusted after ensuing so much damage. With the whales as teachers, humans grew into their giant-ness; their souls eventually filled their bodies and spilled from them. Through being forgiven, they learned to forgive themselves and ultimately forgot anger, vengeance, and pain. They learned to flow with life rather than fighting against its revolving, leaving no more rude imprints on the earth's fragile skin. With no more feet for anguished trudging, they soon began to pass over land without the weighted struggle of tired legs. Humans began using the wisdom for which they had always had potential. They had known great love in their hearts; and it was only the unfortunate monster of advances overrunning logic, logic overrunning the reality of emotional depth, that clouded humans' perceptions of what was innately important. It was a cycle that grew monotonous. And simply had to come to an End...
***
And in the spirit of every crashing wave’s revolution, the End gave way to The Beginning...of the next great evolution.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
The END
Welcome to the evening news.
Tonight:
The collective consciousness is swelling
with anticipation for the end of the world.
Seas are parting, rivers are boiling,
mountains are crumbling, skies are falling,
El-Nino's havoc-wreaking, suburban developments
metastasizing,
Millenium Bug is terrorizing,
Christ Almighty
it's the second coming!
Aliens are landing, people are starving,
black holes are vacuuming the stars in the sky.
Countries are warring, bombs are exploding,
weapons of mass destruction
are making a killing.
The environment's fading
with cloning
overriding
mating,
clear-cuts, oil spills, mad cows, dead fish
pesticides, herbicides, humanity's death wish
hunting, butchering, logging and corporate bull-dozing,
chemicals enhancing, government's snoozing,
animals are losing, extinction's advancing.
One big gun kills the tiniest aphid
and over the pristine web of life,
death is painted;
All blood is tainted.
Not to mention that nothing is sacred.
We look for salvation
in the ideals of a nation
riddled with scandal, lies, and
moral degradation.
Where in search of a thrill, kids take a pill
and it lives in their blood like a syndrome:
Pop a generation X with a glass of Jerry Springer;
induce a glamorous, merciless
suicide by overdose.
Call the psychic spiritual friends
who give free advice
for your soul a minute.
Have internet sex, fall in internet love,
become married-with-children;
just make sure your nice chat partner's not
The Good Pastor of Small Town, America,
A.K.A. "Bob the Mollestor".
Yes, tonight
is the downfall of this civilization
whose corruption overshadows
the great revelation
that free hands shall not push
for segregation,
that big brains shall not plot
degradation,
that never should we fall
by our own confession
But so is The End
of our short-lived session,
and with this procession, pop goes the world
Hey, if God holds true
to the demands of the profession,
get ready to swim,
'cause here
comes
the
flood
Tonight:
The collective consciousness is swelling
with anticipation for the end of the world.
Seas are parting, rivers are boiling,
mountains are crumbling, skies are falling,
El-Nino's havoc-wreaking, suburban developments
metastasizing,
Millenium Bug is terrorizing,
Christ Almighty
it's the second coming!
Aliens are landing, people are starving,
black holes are vacuuming the stars in the sky.
Countries are warring, bombs are exploding,
weapons of mass destruction
are making a killing.
The environment's fading
with cloning
overriding
mating,
clear-cuts, oil spills, mad cows, dead fish
pesticides, herbicides, humanity's death wish
hunting, butchering, logging and corporate bull-dozing,
chemicals enhancing, government's snoozing,
animals are losing, extinction's advancing.
One big gun kills the tiniest aphid
and over the pristine web of life,
death is painted;
All blood is tainted.
Not to mention that nothing is sacred.
We look for salvation
in the ideals of a nation
riddled with scandal, lies, and
moral degradation.
Where in search of a thrill, kids take a pill
and it lives in their blood like a syndrome:
Pop a generation X with a glass of Jerry Springer;
induce a glamorous, merciless
suicide by overdose.
Call the psychic spiritual friends
who give free advice
for your soul a minute.
Have internet sex, fall in internet love,
become married-with-children;
just make sure your nice chat partner's not
The Good Pastor of Small Town, America,
A.K.A. "Bob the Mollestor".
Yes, tonight
is the downfall of this civilization
whose corruption overshadows
the great revelation
that free hands shall not push
for segregation,
that big brains shall not plot
degradation,
that never should we fall
by our own confession
But so is The End
of our short-lived session,
and with this procession, pop goes the world
Hey, if God holds true
to the demands of the profession,
get ready to swim,
'cause here
comes
the
flood
Friday, October 07, 2005
ecological statisticians
scavengers
of the detritus
of dignity
hunters
of evidence
of the law
of chaos
pretenders
of the objectiveness
of grief
quantifiers
of the death
of beauty
consumers
of the calories
of decay
reminders
of the disease
of sentience
harbingers
of the absolution
of sorrow
harvesters
of the organic roots
of grief
purveyors
of the history
of the forever lost
in numbers
of the detritus
of dignity
hunters
of evidence
of the law
of chaos
pretenders
of the objectiveness
of grief
quantifiers
of the death
of beauty
consumers
of the calories
of decay
reminders
of the disease
of sentience
harbingers
of the absolution
of sorrow
harvesters
of the organic roots
of grief
purveyors
of the history
of the forever lost
in numbers
Monday, October 03, 2005
The Conscious Predator
Because we are fascinated by your mysterious, elusive existence, we want to find you; find out more about you; get close to you; feel the way you feel inside. So we hunt you down. We track you with radio collars. We follow your every movement. We harpoon you. Buy, sell, eat and savor your flesh. We take photographs of you and frame them. We capture you, cage you, train you, feed you, play with you, manipulate your behavior to bring you into our realm of understanding. We put you on our schedules. We put you behind bars. Behind walls. Behind thick glass. We find your natural environment stunning, so we go there. We drive our cars, ride in our boats, gun our engines, sputter our smoke, ring our bells, dive in, stir up silt, grab on for dear life. We find your perfection so desirable, we envy you. We want it for ourselves; we want to be you. We want you to know our entrapment, so we trap you. We trick you, ensnare you, take you away from your world, and bring you into ours. We are obsessed with you, and our obsessions are perversions that haunt you. We are so in awe of you that we are afraid of you. We are afraid really of who we are; and who we are not and can never be. So we resent you and want you to feel our pain and grief. So we kill you. We mass murder your kinds until you go extinct. And still, we keep killing. We are ashamed of ourselves; our guilt weighs on us so heavily that it crushes us. So to get out from under it we try and ignore it. To ignore it we have to pretend it is not there. And in so doing, we deny a force that will not be denied its power. Its power makes itself known with or without our permission or admittance of it. So with the power of guilt, which rises up backed by its own need to be heard, in a tone not unlike rage, we hurt you ever more. We know we should leave you alone, let you be. But we don’t want to let you be because we need you; and letting you be means letting you go. We don’t want to let you go, because we want you to need us. We want you to be dependent upon us, so we make ourselves your masters; we turn you into slaves, so that your life becomes necessarily about performing for us so that we will feed you. We give you no choice, then claim that because you don’t make choices the way that we do, (with moral consideration?), or at all (so we have ourselves convinced), then it doesn’t matter what we take from you. Our guilt leads us also to justify our actions to ourselves. If we didn’t, our guilt would swallow us whole and eat us alive. We tell ourselves that what you really want is the safety of captivity. Or worse still, that you don’t have wants, or if you do, you don’t understand what they are, so they are obsolete. We have convinced ourselves that what we’ve done to you – what we do to you – is okay; by believing that because you are not like us, you are merely our property. We know so deeply within that your precious lives are priceless. So we put prices on your heads to appease the insatiable hunger of our guilt. We love you to the point of worship. Because your innocence is precisely that for which our sinful souls strive. For our consciences to be clean, we would have to be other than human. This is what makes us want to become you. We want the escape into mindless enlightenment. We wish that through only righteous choice, we could be pure. Pure like you are without needing to choose it. Pure by nature. We long for the days of our infancy, as both a species and as individuals, before we had to decide to be good, but just simply were. Truly...so truly...we love you. And because we love you, we are sorry...so sorry. We are so deeply remorseful it makes us die inside. We are so ashamed that we put ourselves into cages in our minds as punishment. We whip ourselves for self-control. We force ourselves to do tricks for rewards. It’s the only way we feel we deserve them. Out of self-pity, then, we watch ourselves stagnate and sleep our days away. Our despair causes the loss of our hope. But hopefully...hopefully we can turn our guilt into motivation. Ideally we will use the tools of remorse to build the vehicle for action. Hopefully we can utilize our anger as fuel, and fight with our lives for freedom! Maybe, just maybe, if we can forgive ourselves, thereby unlocking the cage doors in our minds, we won’t take freedom for granted anymore. And equipped with the empowerment of our newfound appreciation, for who you are and who we are too, (as extensions of you), we will realize that to have means not to hold. That to hold means to let go. That to live means to let live; to be means to let be. And most importantly, we shall learn that to love you ...as in the way God Almighty intends for us to love you...means to set you free.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Being the Estuary
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to heaven and there you picked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
- Edgar Allen Poe
It was the first clear day since Mom had come to visit me in the remote Northwest from Denver. I had been plugging San Juan Island's ethereal sunsets as though I were their agent; and tonight, she would be sold. Two days earlier, she had arrived on the ferry, along with hundreds of other Fourth of July passengers, dripping wet and shivering in their shorts and t-shirts. The evening in question, however, was warm enough for short sleeves. The clouds, now scattered throughout the faded-denim sky, resembled a disheveled spider web woven loosely around the earth. The darker blue ocean water filled in forever beneath the cliffside atop which we drove. Dotting the backdrop at every turn in the road were wildflowers of assorted colors, and green of a thousand shades.
I was proud to show her around this place. My summer internship at The Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington marked an important rite in the materialization of my burgeoning adulthood; and my mother's visit was for its celebration. My parents had instilled in me the faith in myself necessary to make my dreams real beyond the fantastic. In this vein, reaching San Juan Island was an act of religious lucidity. The circumstances of my venture there had come together like the synchronistic fibers connecting night dreams and day dreams, and like the loose web of clouds that connected the atmosphere this night. My dreams were of whales. And in ways as subtly powerful as clouds, they declared the prescription of my purpose.
We curved on clunky Volvo wheels around the upper west side of the island, as the view of the waterway stretching across to Victoria hit us like a dam come loose. Our psyches flooded, water-logged. Mom shook her head and said, "My God". The song playing on the radio (from an album called Passion) reached a crescendo; notes collided into uniformity. And the sole verse's words went:
Across the river
Across the river
Across the river
I go
The road now seemed to be floating. To our left was Haro Strait, known to the island's residents as The Orca Highway. I pulled over and parked in a designated "scenic lookout" spot. Mom and I got out of the car and each took deep breaths, inhaling what was too elusive for consumption by words. As I tasted the interface where waking and sleeping states met, I reveled that this precise backdrop was the stage upon which whales had performed beautiful music on endless nights for this slumbering audience of one.
In the original dream, which had occurred eight months prior, I was conscious of being birthed from a dark and narrow channel, into the light at the end of it. I emerged to stand on a piece of dry land only big enough to surround my feet. Beyond the safety of firm ground was the never-ending movement of the sea. Lurking in its immediate shallows were ugly monsters, each representing fear in some aspect of its character. Each fear, with a menacing eye, held me suspended on the stagnant island of false security.
But beyond fear, lived whales. Nurturing as the Every Mother, they were the giant and gentle grace that fear could become, if only it believed in itself; if only it could evolve to go deeper than its solitary power would allow. The whales promised to hold me up to breathe, should I dive into the shallows of fear, and swim past the illusion, into the infinite depths of faith.
The dreams that followed that one were a progressive series. Several in the beginning seemed staged in real time. It was as though, as I proceeded through the channels of consciousness, from waking to deeply sleeping each night, I would emerge to stand on a piece of land overlooking a dark blue sea. I would stand, wait, and hope for whales to come near. I would stand all night long; patient, as though I knew their arrival was imminent. And faith never failed to bring what I needed. Large groups of orcas would finally come into view, taking my breath and replacing it with silent, ecstatic screams. They would pass, and I would wake up.
In the next phase of the dream progression, rather than waiting all night long, I could bring the whales' closeness to fruition with only the power of my will. I would direct my thoughts toward them, and the reaching out was relayed through the underwater channels of minds, all funneling into the estuary of one collective. This is where the whales and I would meet, as long as I believed it could happen.
Later on, as I became more efficient and devout a swimmer, my capacity for connection with the whales became greater. I could not only cause the whales to materialize before me, but further I could swim with them, as if I were one of them, for hours and hours until morning. We would dance together to midnight music with no words; and my assurance of a greater power went far deeper than the solitary confinement of monster prison.
* * *
During the course of the dreams unfolding, my waking life took place in college. I was a freshman at The Evergreen State College, a school famous for its lack of boundaries and fluid ethics of non-traditional academia. I had come from a background of traditional public schooling, where I had thrived in the ways of the system. The liberal ideals of Evergreen enchanted me, though, and sparked an interest that quickly became a fire, blazing my trail to the Pacific Northwest with a fervor I did not quite understand. I only knew I must go.
I left home at eighteen and moved to Washington State to acquire residency. A year later, I began my academic career at a school that asked not for a student's competitive drive to achieve grades, but rather for a belief in herself to swim the uncharted waters of her potential as a unique and creative thinker and doer. In my dreams, I had patience. In daily life at Evergreen, I had tremendous doubt in my personal abilities. I worried constantly that I was wasting time, failing to harness the power inherent in so much freedom. I wanted dry land. I wanted the lifeline of grades, and a list of prerequisites and requirements in plain, clear writing. I was terribly afraid to forgo the security of the island.
By the spring of my first year, I had applied to a "regular" university in Bellingham, Washington, and was ready to accept defeat by the alternative. But one day in May, my botany professor called me aside and gave me the name of another teacher she thought I should contact. She knew of my interest in the local orca population, as our program's theme was about a "sense of place" in the Northwest, and I had written about my own as it related to these whales whose presence gave Washington waters their mystic personality.
The professor's name was Craig Carlson. He taught various subjects, including creative writing, storytelling, and indigenous studies. He also lived on San Juan Island; meaning, he commuted two hours on the ferry and three hours by car to Olympia, which lay at the southernmost tip of the Puget Sound, three days a week to teach on campus. Craig himself was a mystic personality, and was long-time friends with Albert Shepard, curator of The Whale Museum. Professor Bowcut suggested I write an e-mail to Professor Carlson explaining my interest in whales, and see what kind of response I got. So I tapped out a few lines about the desire to actualize dreams in the school's computer lab. Not even a day later, I got a return e-mail from Craig requesting that I be in his office the following afternoon to discuss these matters in person.
After sitting in Craig's office for less than a minute, I realized that this man, indeed, had a persona that reached into some distant orbit. There were Coke cans chiseled into the shape of airplanes, dangling by dental floss from the ceiling. And toys…everywhere. Nothing in Craig's office was neat or tidy. An ingenious dreamer sat at this desk, I was certain. The fact that Craig had called me into a meeting after only the quick correspondence we had exchanged, made me think that he had a kind of foresight unknown to many. I trusted that I was sitting in this messy room for a perfectly sensible reason.
I stood to greet the man when he entered. We shook hands and locked gazes. His eyes were clear blue. And, like mine, were filled with ocean vision. He invited me to sit. Our conversation was short. He briefly referred to my e-mails. He asked me what my dream was. I told him my dream was to study whales, humans' relationship with the sea, and with the animals within themselves. Craig replied, "Can you live on San Juan Island this summer and work as an intern at The Whale Museum?" I said, "What on earth would I do instead?"
I sent my portfolio to Albert Shepard the following day. Craig gave his referral. And Albert accepted me as an intern for the summer quarter. I would live in the basement of the mayor's house, and pay $100.00 a month in rent. Just like that...
And the course of my academic and spiritual future was bound northward. I declined Bellingham's offer of acceptance, as I began to feel empowered by the freedom and opportunity available at Evergreen. I saw that when I was willing to take risks, and believed passionately in what I was doing, I was granted guidance by a greater force in the direction I should travel. The message here came with a consciousness heightened, and tuned in to the melodic voices of whales, saying "Follow us... to the island where the orcas sing!"
* * *
I arrived in the land of the surreal driving a car that adhered plainly to the universe's physical and mechanical laws. I drove; my vehicle in contact with the concrete road. Though however simply logical it all seemed, I had been here before, traveling without a ticket; moving without wheels or walking legs. Swimming with fictitious fins. Even the first time I had stood in this place, atop this rocky cliff where my mother now joined me, it had been an eerily familiar welcoming home.
I had come to this scenic pull-off spot nearly every night since my arrival on San Juan Island two weeks earlier. I had come to watch sunsets and pray for the sight of whales. So far, I had seen only a procession of sunsets, moving days into nights. But the possibility of whales moving along with sunsets kept me coming back, and strengthened my endurance for waiting. I secretly hoped harder that tonight would be the promised night, because I so wanted to share the experience with my Mom. After all, mom was the one who had wished sweet dreams upon me every bed time of my life. It seemed appropriate that she be with me for the awakening.
The fireball of sun ran ever so slowly, an orange-stained teardrop, down the cheek of sky. It made its way behind the mountains, ushering in the purple haze of late evening. It was nearing 9:00 pm, but still, there was enough light for reading. Mom and I found a couple of semi-smooth rocks as close to the waves as we could get before melting into their wake. We contributed to the quiet by barely breathing.
I reached into my backpack for a black spiral notebook. I wanted to share an account of one of my whale dreams with Mom. I had had this dream one week before leaving Olympia for San Juan Island, and was presently noticing a dense sense of sameness in the qualities of the dream and the evening in which we now sat. I opened up my disheveled notebook, bent on all corners from being crammed into my bag and handled ferociously during fits of remembrance from sleep. I flipped to the right page and began to read out loud.
Dream: June 17, 1998
I am walking on a deserted boardwalk and see a sign that reads "Whale watching here is free". I end up on a beach behind a building and see a mass of children in the water playing with several pods of wild whales and dolphins. Although I am astounded by this spectacle, I am ultimately holding out to see killer whales. I comb the water like a detective, sure not to miss an inch of this vast plane of reference. I am patient and careful with a slow moving gaze. I spot a pod coming to pass, swimming fast and jumping wildly. In the same breath, there is one giant male orca, moving separate from the group, and coming directly toward me. My wide eyes dart around to catch all of what is happening, but I become fixated on the male who is approaching the beach at high speed. Initially, the whale's shape is unnatural, like that of a man-made ship. Seaworthy, but not animal. As he approaches the beach, his form streamlines into the perfect curvature of the killer whale. The ground under my feet is no longer sandy, and the shoreline is no longer at foot level with me. The shape of everything in this dynamic has changed, and now the whale and I are on either side of a rock wall, he in the water, me on the land. He is swimming, I am running. We are traveling in congruent parallel lines at a perfect point of conversion between his life and mine.
I extend my left arm to reach the whale, whose giantness emerges from underwater and extends a dorsal fin six feet into the air. He spouts a loud breath and we are moving in sync with each other...fast. The entire length of his body passes under my fingertips. I feel him from rostrum to tail fluke as he gains speed. With the tactile connection of our skin, I feel electrical current color my blood silver. I am sent literally, physically, reeling from the contact. My body, fully extended, hurdles through the sky like a frisbee, spinning and vibrating in slow motion. I rotate in a downward spiral and reach the ground softly. The ground is no longer cement or sand, but cool grass. I lie on my stomach, my face turned to the side; my eyes draining shocked tears into the green. I feel myself winding down from the over stimulation of my every sensory nerve; my body twitches. Finally I stand up and begin walking up a staircase toward a little white building. I pass friends on my way up. I say to them, my voice endowed with the exuberance of lightning, "I just touched an orca...My dreams are coming true".
* * *
Dream: June 18, 1998
I was sitting on an island beach in the San Juans. Before me in the water was a floating platform which served as a "mobile research station". From here, researchers were conducting an experiment to test a hypothesis that stated: Because toothed whale vocalizations are closer in structure to music than they are to the syntax and semantics of human language, orcas should be in some way responsive to music. A group of scientists, including myself, were clad in tuxedos and formal black and white attire. The mobile research station doubled as a stage, set against a 360 degree backdrop of Pacific Northwest splendor. Each one of us took a seat in designated positions to form a symphony orchestra. Not only were each of us whale researchers, but talented classical musicians as well. We began to play a gallant requiem that echoed between the islands like a thunderstorm. We played until sweat poured from our brows. We played until our fingers hurt. We played in and out of history and future, losing the boundaries of time measured any other way than by the tempo of our instrumentation. We played until every note rushed exponentially faster to a raging crescendo, where all sound and every note of natural implementation met and exploded in a glorious, victorious eruption. In the instant of the music's peak, all instruments' sound stopped dead...Complete silence persisted for less than three seconds...and was broken again by the perfect arc of a giant orca, who, on cue, shot skyward from the water and splashed down hard, showering the research team. We all yelled and cheered, as though we had reigned triumphant over a team of disbelievers in the possibility and power of a scientific/creative union.
Following the symphony, the researchers decided to track their lines of reasoning further. Deeper. One scientist, wearing a full-body black wet-suit, positioned himself atop certain rocks or in between specific crevices, where he ascertained the orca would jump next, according to what melody he heard coming from the humans' end. The rest of us played music that corresponded to the man's positioning, and at given moments in the musical performance, the whale emerged from the predicted places and pick up the man in the wet suit, launching him gracefully into the air. Their dazzling interaction was reminiscent of the shows one might expect from SeaWorld, but infinitely more spectacular because this was a free-living whale, whose response to and cooperation with humans was of his own will and desire. The dance took place in his arena, where the walls of his pen were of natural rock and bore no restriction to his life of freedom. Also, it appeared as though scientists had found music to be a medium for communication between whales and humans, which would revolutionize notions about language, nature, and consciousness in ways of unimaginable caliber.
I had had countless whale dreams, but never until this one was I able to hear the whales vocalizing. This dream made their squeaks, whistles, and grunts audible. After listening to whale chatter without the aid of a hydrophone, I stood on the floating platform discussing the study with someone. We explored the notion that the whale had been responding to the music with the same mechanism it utilized for echolocation; a type of biological sonar some refer to as a whale's "sixth sense". I mentioned that the orca singing coincided with an old story in Greek mythology called "The Myth of Dionysus". Prior to this dream, I had never heard of the character Dionysus. As far as I remember I had never been exposed even to the name. The morning after the dream, I learned from a dictionary entry that Dionysus was the god of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Furthermore, Dionysian worship supposedly involved a lot of wild behavior. A group of his worshippers, called Bacchants, typically displayed manic behavior, including orgiastic dancing and singing, and bizarrely paradoxical attitudes toward animals. The word "enthusiasm" was acquainted with Dionysus, in the traditional sense of the Greek word, imparting that the god Dionysus somehow entered into his worshippers and lent them supernatural strength. His female worshippers were naturally inclined to join in the god's ritual celebration, leaving behind their humdrum existence in cities and villages for the unbridled thrill of divine visitation in nature. I read one famous tale about Dionysus that seemed particularly appropriate considering the theme of the dream. The story is that Dionysus once booked passage on a ship, and was traveling in incognito, which was usually his way. The greedy pirates who sailed the ship wished to trap him and use him to their advantage. They were unsuccessful, however, because Dionysus had magical powers and used them to frighten his would-be captors, causing them to jump overboard. Once they hit the water, the pirates turned into dolphins and began to engage in sportive play all about the ship. Dionysus then traveled in peace, ushered by the now kind ship attendants; humans in the skin of dolphins.
In the last scene of the dream, I was riding in a small boat, drifting slowly through the San Juan Islands, coming toward San Juan itself. A woman on the boat whispered, "This is the island where the orcas sing". Just then, we sailed into a cove, where several orcas had convened. We stopped and tuned in to hear them.
Perhaps by involving ourselves in communication with the whales, I thought while analyzing the dream, we humans might learn a more ecstatic and compassionate way of life in general. It seemed ludicrous for me to pass off these important messages as "just dreams", whatever that meant.
I read and became lost in the dreams whose detail and content I, myself, could still hardly fathom. I marveled at the progressive realism of their storylines and imagery, especially as I remembered where I was sitting this moment. I reveled in the pool of juxtapositions that made life itself seem like one long dream, smattered with temporary awakenings, interjected to break up the monotony. I had just finished reading when I felt the slightest touch on my arm. Mom whispered with intense inflection in her voice,
"Liz, listen...the whales are here."
My immediate response was to pass off her comment as my mother's sensitive spot for synchronicity. I looked out at the water, and for a moment saw nothing but the usual fin-shaped waves that had fooled me in many a wishful moment. I kept quiet though, and watched so fixedly in the direction mom was pointing that I may have burned a hole through empty space. Suddenly, an adult male orca from J pod, named Ruffles, poked his six-foot tall dorsal fin through the water's surface and breathed loudly into the pure calm. A cloud of mist erupted softly from his blow hole. Water seeped into my head. I poured into the sea. And dreams were no longer asleep.
Mom and I stared, astounded and riddled with adrenalin. At first, and for several minutes, we saw only Ruffles, swimming back and forth near the rocks, most likely foraging a salmon dinner. After some time, another male, a juvenile, appeared near the adult. The two males stayed within approximately 30 feet of one another, according to my shore-side perception. They disappeared for 1 to 2 minutes at least, with the exception of longer, deeper dives which lasted between 3 and 6 minutes. They paced, though not nervously, from north to south and back, repeatedly covering the area 100 yards to the left and right of where Mom and I sat watching. After 15 or 20 minutes, quiet but for breaths, there were three, then four whales meandering before us. They traversed their world so perfectly; and so perfectly crossed over into ours. They made it one world; the world of the breath.
Kwoosh. To the left of us, a whale's breath. And following, a brief glimpse of the fin on its back. And he slides quietly back undercover.
All is quiet. Hearts pound audibly. My breath is slow and I can hear it, too. Waiting for the next breath. A minute passes.
Kwoosh. Another one to the right. And back underneath.
Quiet for two minutes. Blink. Blink. Stare. Waiting.
Kwoosh. Straight ahead. The first male breathes again. I shift my weight to the other foot, now standing. Swallow. Blink. Wait. Wait some more.
Kwoosh. Out there! There she is again...
Approximately half an hour passed with the four whales, marked unevenly by the rests between their breaths and the beats of our hearts. I sensed these few must have been ahead of the rest of J pod. Mom affirmed my thought by pointing southward, asking if I thought the apparent upset in the water appeared to be broken waves or breaching whales. Distant shapes and churning water turned to clear outlines of dorsal fins as the whales approached and came into clear focus.
I ran along the edge of the cliff, trying to get as close as possible to the interface without falling out of my shoes and into the dream. I got smaller as the fins got bigger. Mom soon caught up and stood by my side. We hung in the air over the barely-lit royal blue water. My feet clung to the rock while I soared. Where previously there had been four whales, now there were twelve.
Kwoosh. Left.
Kwooosh. Right.
And now twenty.
Kwooooosh. Left, right, out there; and there. There too!
Maybe twenty five. Where have they all come from? There must be thirty whales, right here. Right in front of us!
Kwoosh. Blink, blink; stumble. Kwoosh; hop. Step. step. Fumbling feet. Run. Run. Run. Kwoooosh. KwooshKwoooooshKwooshhh...
They're everywhere. I can't keep an accurate count anymore.
The whales and I moved in congruent parallel lines. "Mom...I whispered. My dreams are coming true."
And time ceased by intervals between inhales and exhales because there was no longer any dead space between breaths. The symphony of orcas, dressed in their stunning black and white, were instruments in their own bodies. They were giant and great enough to transmit the music of nature in all its formlessness and subtle perfection. The moon was big and crayon-yellow and hung low and bright in the night. Stars now spotted the backdrop canvas of sky with silvery white blobs of stars. Nature's spotlight shone on a patch of water before us where nearly thirty black and white whales had gathered, and were performing under no direction from us. We were merely spectators, blessed to witness this moment. To the whales, it was just another evening of living a whale's life. To mom and me, it held the most meaning one can glean from the experience of living a human's life.
Their bodies were percussive as they slapped giant tails and pectoral fins on the water's exterior. One female protruded half way above the water line in a spy hop, briefly scanning the shore. She shrieked a call into the air that mimicked an orchestra warming up in the pit. She exerted a high-pitched whistle-squeal-squeak-click; rare to be heard above water. I fell to my knees.
The typical faculties of consciousness were engaged, but not merely. The whales were too big for comprehension. They rocked with the rotation of flurried water molecules, diving and surfacing. They breathed and we breathed. And there was nothing but breathing. So simple I could not comprehend. The ins and outs. The visible clouds.
As far as reason could reason, our encounter was a random one. Though down to their mathematical foundation, even random events are not without logical roots. Perhaps we had all simply chosen the same place to be when the sun went down. Regardless of intellectual justification, it was an experience of immense realism. It was intimate and primal and personal. It was an anomalous feeling found in humanness, yet was more real than anything I had ever seen, smelled, tasted, heard, grasped with my own fingers, or known, by any combination of the aforementioned senses. It was more than I could have experienced by logic or faith alone. Only within the unity of the two could any of this make perfect sense.
The vague, remnant light of the moon was now the only light. The whales were ready to move on. We didn't want them to go. We didn't want to wake. But dreams are fluid and cannot be frozen in time. Whales swim continually through my head, and I couldn't dream of stifling their movement. For dreams cannot be captured; only treasured, with the intensity of a breathing, pulsing awareness. These brief encounters spent on the rocky edge between land and liquid fuse boundaries until they melt.
The distant outline of dorsal silhouettes undulated like protrusions on carousel horses, drawing the horizon line unstable as they passed across it going south. Their black and white sewed the seam between sea and sky. Day became night. Mom and I drove away in silence. The light went completely out, and I fell asleep to the circular, hollow chime of whales turning the tides with their lungs in my head. Repeating the secret of dreams until I fell asleep, fell in, and crossed over.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
- Edgar Allen Poe
It was the first clear day since Mom had come to visit me in the remote Northwest from Denver. I had been plugging San Juan Island's ethereal sunsets as though I were their agent; and tonight, she would be sold. Two days earlier, she had arrived on the ferry, along with hundreds of other Fourth of July passengers, dripping wet and shivering in their shorts and t-shirts. The evening in question, however, was warm enough for short sleeves. The clouds, now scattered throughout the faded-denim sky, resembled a disheveled spider web woven loosely around the earth. The darker blue ocean water filled in forever beneath the cliffside atop which we drove. Dotting the backdrop at every turn in the road were wildflowers of assorted colors, and green of a thousand shades.
I was proud to show her around this place. My summer internship at The Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington marked an important rite in the materialization of my burgeoning adulthood; and my mother's visit was for its celebration. My parents had instilled in me the faith in myself necessary to make my dreams real beyond the fantastic. In this vein, reaching San Juan Island was an act of religious lucidity. The circumstances of my venture there had come together like the synchronistic fibers connecting night dreams and day dreams, and like the loose web of clouds that connected the atmosphere this night. My dreams were of whales. And in ways as subtly powerful as clouds, they declared the prescription of my purpose.
We curved on clunky Volvo wheels around the upper west side of the island, as the view of the waterway stretching across to Victoria hit us like a dam come loose. Our psyches flooded, water-logged. Mom shook her head and said, "My God". The song playing on the radio (from an album called Passion) reached a crescendo; notes collided into uniformity. And the sole verse's words went:
Across the river
Across the river
Across the river
I go
The road now seemed to be floating. To our left was Haro Strait, known to the island's residents as The Orca Highway. I pulled over and parked in a designated "scenic lookout" spot. Mom and I got out of the car and each took deep breaths, inhaling what was too elusive for consumption by words. As I tasted the interface where waking and sleeping states met, I reveled that this precise backdrop was the stage upon which whales had performed beautiful music on endless nights for this slumbering audience of one.
In the original dream, which had occurred eight months prior, I was conscious of being birthed from a dark and narrow channel, into the light at the end of it. I emerged to stand on a piece of dry land only big enough to surround my feet. Beyond the safety of firm ground was the never-ending movement of the sea. Lurking in its immediate shallows were ugly monsters, each representing fear in some aspect of its character. Each fear, with a menacing eye, held me suspended on the stagnant island of false security.
But beyond fear, lived whales. Nurturing as the Every Mother, they were the giant and gentle grace that fear could become, if only it believed in itself; if only it could evolve to go deeper than its solitary power would allow. The whales promised to hold me up to breathe, should I dive into the shallows of fear, and swim past the illusion, into the infinite depths of faith.
The dreams that followed that one were a progressive series. Several in the beginning seemed staged in real time. It was as though, as I proceeded through the channels of consciousness, from waking to deeply sleeping each night, I would emerge to stand on a piece of land overlooking a dark blue sea. I would stand, wait, and hope for whales to come near. I would stand all night long; patient, as though I knew their arrival was imminent. And faith never failed to bring what I needed. Large groups of orcas would finally come into view, taking my breath and replacing it with silent, ecstatic screams. They would pass, and I would wake up.
In the next phase of the dream progression, rather than waiting all night long, I could bring the whales' closeness to fruition with only the power of my will. I would direct my thoughts toward them, and the reaching out was relayed through the underwater channels of minds, all funneling into the estuary of one collective. This is where the whales and I would meet, as long as I believed it could happen.
Later on, as I became more efficient and devout a swimmer, my capacity for connection with the whales became greater. I could not only cause the whales to materialize before me, but further I could swim with them, as if I were one of them, for hours and hours until morning. We would dance together to midnight music with no words; and my assurance of a greater power went far deeper than the solitary confinement of monster prison.
* * *
During the course of the dreams unfolding, my waking life took place in college. I was a freshman at The Evergreen State College, a school famous for its lack of boundaries and fluid ethics of non-traditional academia. I had come from a background of traditional public schooling, where I had thrived in the ways of the system. The liberal ideals of Evergreen enchanted me, though, and sparked an interest that quickly became a fire, blazing my trail to the Pacific Northwest with a fervor I did not quite understand. I only knew I must go.
I left home at eighteen and moved to Washington State to acquire residency. A year later, I began my academic career at a school that asked not for a student's competitive drive to achieve grades, but rather for a belief in herself to swim the uncharted waters of her potential as a unique and creative thinker and doer. In my dreams, I had patience. In daily life at Evergreen, I had tremendous doubt in my personal abilities. I worried constantly that I was wasting time, failing to harness the power inherent in so much freedom. I wanted dry land. I wanted the lifeline of grades, and a list of prerequisites and requirements in plain, clear writing. I was terribly afraid to forgo the security of the island.
By the spring of my first year, I had applied to a "regular" university in Bellingham, Washington, and was ready to accept defeat by the alternative. But one day in May, my botany professor called me aside and gave me the name of another teacher she thought I should contact. She knew of my interest in the local orca population, as our program's theme was about a "sense of place" in the Northwest, and I had written about my own as it related to these whales whose presence gave Washington waters their mystic personality.
The professor's name was Craig Carlson. He taught various subjects, including creative writing, storytelling, and indigenous studies. He also lived on San Juan Island; meaning, he commuted two hours on the ferry and three hours by car to Olympia, which lay at the southernmost tip of the Puget Sound, three days a week to teach on campus. Craig himself was a mystic personality, and was long-time friends with Albert Shepard, curator of The Whale Museum. Professor Bowcut suggested I write an e-mail to Professor Carlson explaining my interest in whales, and see what kind of response I got. So I tapped out a few lines about the desire to actualize dreams in the school's computer lab. Not even a day later, I got a return e-mail from Craig requesting that I be in his office the following afternoon to discuss these matters in person.
After sitting in Craig's office for less than a minute, I realized that this man, indeed, had a persona that reached into some distant orbit. There were Coke cans chiseled into the shape of airplanes, dangling by dental floss from the ceiling. And toys…everywhere. Nothing in Craig's office was neat or tidy. An ingenious dreamer sat at this desk, I was certain. The fact that Craig had called me into a meeting after only the quick correspondence we had exchanged, made me think that he had a kind of foresight unknown to many. I trusted that I was sitting in this messy room for a perfectly sensible reason.
I stood to greet the man when he entered. We shook hands and locked gazes. His eyes were clear blue. And, like mine, were filled with ocean vision. He invited me to sit. Our conversation was short. He briefly referred to my e-mails. He asked me what my dream was. I told him my dream was to study whales, humans' relationship with the sea, and with the animals within themselves. Craig replied, "Can you live on San Juan Island this summer and work as an intern at The Whale Museum?" I said, "What on earth would I do instead?"
I sent my portfolio to Albert Shepard the following day. Craig gave his referral. And Albert accepted me as an intern for the summer quarter. I would live in the basement of the mayor's house, and pay $100.00 a month in rent. Just like that...
And the course of my academic and spiritual future was bound northward. I declined Bellingham's offer of acceptance, as I began to feel empowered by the freedom and opportunity available at Evergreen. I saw that when I was willing to take risks, and believed passionately in what I was doing, I was granted guidance by a greater force in the direction I should travel. The message here came with a consciousness heightened, and tuned in to the melodic voices of whales, saying "Follow us... to the island where the orcas sing!"
* * *
I arrived in the land of the surreal driving a car that adhered plainly to the universe's physical and mechanical laws. I drove; my vehicle in contact with the concrete road. Though however simply logical it all seemed, I had been here before, traveling without a ticket; moving without wheels or walking legs. Swimming with fictitious fins. Even the first time I had stood in this place, atop this rocky cliff where my mother now joined me, it had been an eerily familiar welcoming home.
I had come to this scenic pull-off spot nearly every night since my arrival on San Juan Island two weeks earlier. I had come to watch sunsets and pray for the sight of whales. So far, I had seen only a procession of sunsets, moving days into nights. But the possibility of whales moving along with sunsets kept me coming back, and strengthened my endurance for waiting. I secretly hoped harder that tonight would be the promised night, because I so wanted to share the experience with my Mom. After all, mom was the one who had wished sweet dreams upon me every bed time of my life. It seemed appropriate that she be with me for the awakening.
The fireball of sun ran ever so slowly, an orange-stained teardrop, down the cheek of sky. It made its way behind the mountains, ushering in the purple haze of late evening. It was nearing 9:00 pm, but still, there was enough light for reading. Mom and I found a couple of semi-smooth rocks as close to the waves as we could get before melting into their wake. We contributed to the quiet by barely breathing.
I reached into my backpack for a black spiral notebook. I wanted to share an account of one of my whale dreams with Mom. I had had this dream one week before leaving Olympia for San Juan Island, and was presently noticing a dense sense of sameness in the qualities of the dream and the evening in which we now sat. I opened up my disheveled notebook, bent on all corners from being crammed into my bag and handled ferociously during fits of remembrance from sleep. I flipped to the right page and began to read out loud.
Dream: June 17, 1998
I am walking on a deserted boardwalk and see a sign that reads "Whale watching here is free". I end up on a beach behind a building and see a mass of children in the water playing with several pods of wild whales and dolphins. Although I am astounded by this spectacle, I am ultimately holding out to see killer whales. I comb the water like a detective, sure not to miss an inch of this vast plane of reference. I am patient and careful with a slow moving gaze. I spot a pod coming to pass, swimming fast and jumping wildly. In the same breath, there is one giant male orca, moving separate from the group, and coming directly toward me. My wide eyes dart around to catch all of what is happening, but I become fixated on the male who is approaching the beach at high speed. Initially, the whale's shape is unnatural, like that of a man-made ship. Seaworthy, but not animal. As he approaches the beach, his form streamlines into the perfect curvature of the killer whale. The ground under my feet is no longer sandy, and the shoreline is no longer at foot level with me. The shape of everything in this dynamic has changed, and now the whale and I are on either side of a rock wall, he in the water, me on the land. He is swimming, I am running. We are traveling in congruent parallel lines at a perfect point of conversion between his life and mine.
I extend my left arm to reach the whale, whose giantness emerges from underwater and extends a dorsal fin six feet into the air. He spouts a loud breath and we are moving in sync with each other...fast. The entire length of his body passes under my fingertips. I feel him from rostrum to tail fluke as he gains speed. With the tactile connection of our skin, I feel electrical current color my blood silver. I am sent literally, physically, reeling from the contact. My body, fully extended, hurdles through the sky like a frisbee, spinning and vibrating in slow motion. I rotate in a downward spiral and reach the ground softly. The ground is no longer cement or sand, but cool grass. I lie on my stomach, my face turned to the side; my eyes draining shocked tears into the green. I feel myself winding down from the over stimulation of my every sensory nerve; my body twitches. Finally I stand up and begin walking up a staircase toward a little white building. I pass friends on my way up. I say to them, my voice endowed with the exuberance of lightning, "I just touched an orca...My dreams are coming true".
* * *
Dream: June 18, 1998
I was sitting on an island beach in the San Juans. Before me in the water was a floating platform which served as a "mobile research station". From here, researchers were conducting an experiment to test a hypothesis that stated: Because toothed whale vocalizations are closer in structure to music than they are to the syntax and semantics of human language, orcas should be in some way responsive to music. A group of scientists, including myself, were clad in tuxedos and formal black and white attire. The mobile research station doubled as a stage, set against a 360 degree backdrop of Pacific Northwest splendor. Each one of us took a seat in designated positions to form a symphony orchestra. Not only were each of us whale researchers, but talented classical musicians as well. We began to play a gallant requiem that echoed between the islands like a thunderstorm. We played until sweat poured from our brows. We played until our fingers hurt. We played in and out of history and future, losing the boundaries of time measured any other way than by the tempo of our instrumentation. We played until every note rushed exponentially faster to a raging crescendo, where all sound and every note of natural implementation met and exploded in a glorious, victorious eruption. In the instant of the music's peak, all instruments' sound stopped dead...Complete silence persisted for less than three seconds...and was broken again by the perfect arc of a giant orca, who, on cue, shot skyward from the water and splashed down hard, showering the research team. We all yelled and cheered, as though we had reigned triumphant over a team of disbelievers in the possibility and power of a scientific/creative union.
Following the symphony, the researchers decided to track their lines of reasoning further. Deeper. One scientist, wearing a full-body black wet-suit, positioned himself atop certain rocks or in between specific crevices, where he ascertained the orca would jump next, according to what melody he heard coming from the humans' end. The rest of us played music that corresponded to the man's positioning, and at given moments in the musical performance, the whale emerged from the predicted places and pick up the man in the wet suit, launching him gracefully into the air. Their dazzling interaction was reminiscent of the shows one might expect from SeaWorld, but infinitely more spectacular because this was a free-living whale, whose response to and cooperation with humans was of his own will and desire. The dance took place in his arena, where the walls of his pen were of natural rock and bore no restriction to his life of freedom. Also, it appeared as though scientists had found music to be a medium for communication between whales and humans, which would revolutionize notions about language, nature, and consciousness in ways of unimaginable caliber.
I had had countless whale dreams, but never until this one was I able to hear the whales vocalizing. This dream made their squeaks, whistles, and grunts audible. After listening to whale chatter without the aid of a hydrophone, I stood on the floating platform discussing the study with someone. We explored the notion that the whale had been responding to the music with the same mechanism it utilized for echolocation; a type of biological sonar some refer to as a whale's "sixth sense". I mentioned that the orca singing coincided with an old story in Greek mythology called "The Myth of Dionysus". Prior to this dream, I had never heard of the character Dionysus. As far as I remember I had never been exposed even to the name. The morning after the dream, I learned from a dictionary entry that Dionysus was the god of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Furthermore, Dionysian worship supposedly involved a lot of wild behavior. A group of his worshippers, called Bacchants, typically displayed manic behavior, including orgiastic dancing and singing, and bizarrely paradoxical attitudes toward animals. The word "enthusiasm" was acquainted with Dionysus, in the traditional sense of the Greek word, imparting that the god Dionysus somehow entered into his worshippers and lent them supernatural strength. His female worshippers were naturally inclined to join in the god's ritual celebration, leaving behind their humdrum existence in cities and villages for the unbridled thrill of divine visitation in nature. I read one famous tale about Dionysus that seemed particularly appropriate considering the theme of the dream. The story is that Dionysus once booked passage on a ship, and was traveling in incognito, which was usually his way. The greedy pirates who sailed the ship wished to trap him and use him to their advantage. They were unsuccessful, however, because Dionysus had magical powers and used them to frighten his would-be captors, causing them to jump overboard. Once they hit the water, the pirates turned into dolphins and began to engage in sportive play all about the ship. Dionysus then traveled in peace, ushered by the now kind ship attendants; humans in the skin of dolphins.
In the last scene of the dream, I was riding in a small boat, drifting slowly through the San Juan Islands, coming toward San Juan itself. A woman on the boat whispered, "This is the island where the orcas sing". Just then, we sailed into a cove, where several orcas had convened. We stopped and tuned in to hear them.
Perhaps by involving ourselves in communication with the whales, I thought while analyzing the dream, we humans might learn a more ecstatic and compassionate way of life in general. It seemed ludicrous for me to pass off these important messages as "just dreams", whatever that meant.
I read and became lost in the dreams whose detail and content I, myself, could still hardly fathom. I marveled at the progressive realism of their storylines and imagery, especially as I remembered where I was sitting this moment. I reveled in the pool of juxtapositions that made life itself seem like one long dream, smattered with temporary awakenings, interjected to break up the monotony. I had just finished reading when I felt the slightest touch on my arm. Mom whispered with intense inflection in her voice,
"Liz, listen...the whales are here."
My immediate response was to pass off her comment as my mother's sensitive spot for synchronicity. I looked out at the water, and for a moment saw nothing but the usual fin-shaped waves that had fooled me in many a wishful moment. I kept quiet though, and watched so fixedly in the direction mom was pointing that I may have burned a hole through empty space. Suddenly, an adult male orca from J pod, named Ruffles, poked his six-foot tall dorsal fin through the water's surface and breathed loudly into the pure calm. A cloud of mist erupted softly from his blow hole. Water seeped into my head. I poured into the sea. And dreams were no longer asleep.
Mom and I stared, astounded and riddled with adrenalin. At first, and for several minutes, we saw only Ruffles, swimming back and forth near the rocks, most likely foraging a salmon dinner. After some time, another male, a juvenile, appeared near the adult. The two males stayed within approximately 30 feet of one another, according to my shore-side perception. They disappeared for 1 to 2 minutes at least, with the exception of longer, deeper dives which lasted between 3 and 6 minutes. They paced, though not nervously, from north to south and back, repeatedly covering the area 100 yards to the left and right of where Mom and I sat watching. After 15 or 20 minutes, quiet but for breaths, there were three, then four whales meandering before us. They traversed their world so perfectly; and so perfectly crossed over into ours. They made it one world; the world of the breath.
Kwoosh. To the left of us, a whale's breath. And following, a brief glimpse of the fin on its back. And he slides quietly back undercover.
All is quiet. Hearts pound audibly. My breath is slow and I can hear it, too. Waiting for the next breath. A minute passes.
Kwoosh. Another one to the right. And back underneath.
Quiet for two minutes. Blink. Blink. Stare. Waiting.
Kwoosh. Straight ahead. The first male breathes again. I shift my weight to the other foot, now standing. Swallow. Blink. Wait. Wait some more.
Kwoosh. Out there! There she is again...
Approximately half an hour passed with the four whales, marked unevenly by the rests between their breaths and the beats of our hearts. I sensed these few must have been ahead of the rest of J pod. Mom affirmed my thought by pointing southward, asking if I thought the apparent upset in the water appeared to be broken waves or breaching whales. Distant shapes and churning water turned to clear outlines of dorsal fins as the whales approached and came into clear focus.
I ran along the edge of the cliff, trying to get as close as possible to the interface without falling out of my shoes and into the dream. I got smaller as the fins got bigger. Mom soon caught up and stood by my side. We hung in the air over the barely-lit royal blue water. My feet clung to the rock while I soared. Where previously there had been four whales, now there were twelve.
Kwoosh. Left.
Kwooosh. Right.
And now twenty.
Kwooooosh. Left, right, out there; and there. There too!
Maybe twenty five. Where have they all come from? There must be thirty whales, right here. Right in front of us!
Kwoosh. Blink, blink; stumble. Kwoosh; hop. Step. step. Fumbling feet. Run. Run. Run. Kwoooosh. KwooshKwoooooshKwooshhh...
They're everywhere. I can't keep an accurate count anymore.
The whales and I moved in congruent parallel lines. "Mom...I whispered. My dreams are coming true."
And time ceased by intervals between inhales and exhales because there was no longer any dead space between breaths. The symphony of orcas, dressed in their stunning black and white, were instruments in their own bodies. They were giant and great enough to transmit the music of nature in all its formlessness and subtle perfection. The moon was big and crayon-yellow and hung low and bright in the night. Stars now spotted the backdrop canvas of sky with silvery white blobs of stars. Nature's spotlight shone on a patch of water before us where nearly thirty black and white whales had gathered, and were performing under no direction from us. We were merely spectators, blessed to witness this moment. To the whales, it was just another evening of living a whale's life. To mom and me, it held the most meaning one can glean from the experience of living a human's life.
Their bodies were percussive as they slapped giant tails and pectoral fins on the water's exterior. One female protruded half way above the water line in a spy hop, briefly scanning the shore. She shrieked a call into the air that mimicked an orchestra warming up in the pit. She exerted a high-pitched whistle-squeal-squeak-click; rare to be heard above water. I fell to my knees.
The typical faculties of consciousness were engaged, but not merely. The whales were too big for comprehension. They rocked with the rotation of flurried water molecules, diving and surfacing. They breathed and we breathed. And there was nothing but breathing. So simple I could not comprehend. The ins and outs. The visible clouds.
As far as reason could reason, our encounter was a random one. Though down to their mathematical foundation, even random events are not without logical roots. Perhaps we had all simply chosen the same place to be when the sun went down. Regardless of intellectual justification, it was an experience of immense realism. It was intimate and primal and personal. It was an anomalous feeling found in humanness, yet was more real than anything I had ever seen, smelled, tasted, heard, grasped with my own fingers, or known, by any combination of the aforementioned senses. It was more than I could have experienced by logic or faith alone. Only within the unity of the two could any of this make perfect sense.
The vague, remnant light of the moon was now the only light. The whales were ready to move on. We didn't want them to go. We didn't want to wake. But dreams are fluid and cannot be frozen in time. Whales swim continually through my head, and I couldn't dream of stifling their movement. For dreams cannot be captured; only treasured, with the intensity of a breathing, pulsing awareness. These brief encounters spent on the rocky edge between land and liquid fuse boundaries until they melt.
The distant outline of dorsal silhouettes undulated like protrusions on carousel horses, drawing the horizon line unstable as they passed across it going south. Their black and white sewed the seam between sea and sky. Day became night. Mom and I drove away in silence. The light went completely out, and I fell asleep to the circular, hollow chime of whales turning the tides with their lungs in my head. Repeating the secret of dreams until I fell asleep, fell in, and crossed over.
Hope is Wild
I applied for an internship at the zoo in order to challenge my most pressing beliefs. Not with intention to change them; rather, to make them stronger. Any who knew my creed of freedom may have seen my working at a zoo as contradictory. Perhaps it is ironic that I wanted to work at the zoo because I pray to Freedom as the highest ideal of Nature and Divinity. But because I do, issues of freedom and captivity are paramount. In order to be a free conscious animal, I must understand what strives to keep me bound.
With both strong beliefs and an open mind in tact, I entered the gates of Point Defiance Zoo. I held the honest desire to meet human beings whose livelihood is in training marine mammals. Of course my motives were partially selfish. I was overwrought with desire to get close to the animals. I wanted to touch them and watch their every move. I wanted to learn from them, in an attempt to redeem the plights that humans - in spite of nature - had chosen for them.
* * *
I consider myself to be an activist, although not one who employs so-called "front line" tactics. I am not the one in between the gun and the fur. I am not the one in between the whale and the harpoon. I am not one to hate or blame another for having views that oppose my own. I get angry and sometimes self-righteous. But fundamentally, I realize that these emotions do not fuel the light of positive change. In that movement, I wish to be the one between the match and the candle, inspiring fire to shed new light in minds.
I believe that true activist movements happen when human beings are moved from an emotional place within. This movement then directs itself outward, in the form of actions by the individual that proclaim the motivating ethic of self-responsibility. Prior to working at a zoo, it would have been too easy for me, as an activist "on the side of freedom", to claim that zoos are in opposition to freedom and that, by the law of dual logic, "zoo keepers" are the jailers and the enemies. However, what I truly oppose is this sort of bipolar thinking, which lends itself to a paralysis of forward movement; invariably, it is the opponent of change. I could have adopted the opposing way of thought, and added the fictional genre of zoo keepers to the list of opponents against whom I should spend my life fighting. But what kind of life would that be? It would be a dishonest life, because I had yet to meet a zookeeper in the flesh. And furthermore, because of my born humanness, I am by nature a trapper of wilderness. The understanding of one’s own mortality, set against the background of infinite time, makes an animal afraid. It is what makes the human animal mind a kind of locked chamber of its own.
Zoo keepers were a construct in my mind, as were zoos; the products of stereotypes based on ignorance. How could I have rightfully claimed that this imagined group of characters were the enemies to "my" cause. This would have been yet another convenient way of pushing responsibility onto some other proverbial person's plate, in blame, and denying my own place in this plight that belongs to all of us and each of us. Not only some; not only others.
* * *
The difficulty I encountered when I started the internship surprised me. It was not hard to become comfortable within the confinement of the zoo. It was instead hard to resist the appeal of this "controlled environment", where it was easy and felt safe. The animals were fed on a schedule, and were played with x-amount of times daily. The uncertainty of events extended to which toys we decided to throw into the whale or walrus pool on a given day; to the occasional mixing-up of the feeding and training schedules; and to the choice of enrichment items we would scatter in the animals' exhibits. These might be honey or fruit to activate the animals' olfactory senses; or something new to chew on; sometimes fish frozen in ice for the polar bears. These means of variation were to stimulate the animals, and supposedly assure that their awareness would not atrophy in the absence of Nature's amorphous obstacles.
The conflict I faced, dueling between the comfort of predictability and the challenge of what's wild, was in essence a microcosm of the bigger conflict we face being human animals. We are creatures of nature that think the way humans think. Our minds of logic seek the comfort of control; while the innate know-how of our cells and senses mimic the more fluid dynamic of nature, and a surrendering to what flows. In the natural world, change is an ever-present opponent. And the outcome of every battle an animal fights for its survival is uncertain.
* * *
My interest in whales and dolphins originated as the result of dreams, in which the animals and I coexisted in graceful underwater flight. In these dreams, I experienced a sensation of freedom I have never known in the waking world. I was weightless and gigantic in the same breath. Since the dreams have tapered, I figure that my challenge is to manifest the dreams' intangible intricacies in the actions of my "real" life. I must learn to be weightless in my own body. Transcend the bearing down of gravity. I feel it is my responsibility, as a human being with a free mind, and as an animal who is blessed enough to live a free life, to communicate the importance of freedom to others. The dreams continue to inform me, with every word I speak; behind every act of humanness. Before the beginning of anything.
* * *
During my interview with J., the head trainer at "Rocky Shores" marine mammal habitats, I espoused pieces of my philosophy in response to her questions. I was honest when she asked about my thoughts regarding animals in captivity. "I do not stand on one side of the battle line or the other." I said. "I have had experience at the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, watching killer whales in their natural habitat, and working among some well known scientists in the field of behavioral ecology. Some may see this field as one side of a coin, while captive facilities represent the other side. I agree to an extent. Though I look at both as realistic halves to a whole dynamic. They both exist, as does every shade of gray between them. And I want to understand the whole, not fragments. I want to see the connection between the halves, in order to better understand the tension at their interface. Mostly, I refuse to follow behind the blind lead of misinformed bias."
J. then revealed one of her own beliefs which saddened me. She said , "I don't believe that any true wild exists anymore". I could, of course, understand her reasoning. After all, who has yet to hear that the natural world is under the auspices of human evil, and will soon perish into final extinction? I knew what she was saying all too well. But I had at some point decided that at the root of all human conflict from which destruction emerges was the loss of hope. J.'s comment, to me, translated as a loss of hope. If there was no wild left -- truly, none left in J.'s mind or heart -- what was left to fight for? Might as well live with the locked cage doors and cement walls, night after night, and go home believing "that's just the way it is, and the way it has to be and so will be."
* * *
Hope is the wilderness of the human heart. To hope is to stray from the logic of what appears imminent. Staying locked up behind the belief that all is lost is easier, certainly, than living a wild life -- a life of hope. This life is a challenge. Its challenge is purposeful. And contending with its weight is overwhelming; at times excruciatingly so.
I watched the animals on a daily basis. I saw how genuinely they were cared for. I saw how well they were trained to behave in response to positive reinforcement. Particularly, I watched the whales.
A Skinner Box was filled with saltwater from the Puget Sound, and inside it, two captive-born belugas lived out their days and nights. I wasn't allowed to touch them for the first six weeks of my internship, as touching the body of the whales was to the intern what a big, juicy mackerel was to the whales. It was the greatest reward; the highest form of positive reinforcement. I had many other tasks to work through on the intern checklist before I was allowed to conduct timed play sessions, in which I could throw certain plastic toys into the water for the whales to bring back. I would spend weeks hosing and cleaning exhibits before I was allowed "contact". It was effective training. I behaved the way I knew I had to in order to get what I wanted. And just as Skinner promised, my behavior predicted my reward.
* * *
T. was another keeper at Rocky Shores. One day, T. and I were cleaning out the polar bear dens, when again, the issue of freedom came up in conversation. T. explained to me that she believes both freedom and captivity are human concepts, and concepts alone. This implies that there are not actualities behind the conceptualizations.
I looked around at the dens. They were cold, square, cement cells, each with its fourth wall made of steel bars. Because freedom and captivity are merely human ideas, T. said, animals could not "have", or be had, by either. She also said that, assuming animals did know the difference between their freedom or captivity, and if given a choice between the two, they would choose the latter.
"As humans," she said, "We think in human terms...Sure, if I were an eagle, the sky wouldn't be big enough! If I were a whale, the ocean wouldn't be deep enough! But animals," she said, "are opportunistic. Animals don't want to deal with the hardships of a free life! Not when living enclosed, within a set of simple rules for behavior and subsequent reward is easier. Give an animal all it needs to survive: food (hand-fed), shelter, and a clean, safe enclosure, the animal will be happy. Safe, satiated, and happy."
"The ocean"...she continued. "We idealize the ocean and all the beauty it inspires. But the ocean is a dangerous place! Like a dream, like life, you never know what's going to happen next, or what might be lurking around every corner. We imagine whales and dolphins playing all day long, when truly, they are fighting to stay alive in the unruly underside of the free world."
I could see what she meant; so clearly, in fact, that I almost had trouble forming a rebuttal. Was I beginning to believe in the righteousness of captivity? I couldn't be. Because I had never believed that a life of freedom was easy. Instead I had decided that challenge is what made life an ongoing opportunity for growth. And indeed, what made it worth living.
Without struggling for survival, how is one to grow or evolve to become more efficient a soul? Without trudging through the misshapen terrain nature has laid before us, how are we to take the paths that are rightfully ours to tread? We must pay the price, taking action that will benefit us later with rewards.
Certainly, an animal's life is easier in captivity. And it is easier to justify this belief rather than facing the hardship that accompanies -- rather, defines -- freedom. It is also easier to justify the idea that zoos are the last refuge and hope for the survival of wild animals, in lieu of giving up on saving natural resources and habitats through the promotion of hope in wildness. But putting an animal in a cage is like putting a child in his bedroom with a big-screen t.v., a VCR, a video game system, and the biggest tub of ice cream available at the convenience store. There, he is safe, satiated, and happy. But he has no recognition of his divine gift as a unique biological creation, born to evolve the life and body granted to him. He is left to believe that a sedentary, unhealthy life is enough. Though actually, he grows sick and fat on this diet of gluttonous, commercial feed. And sadly, he is missing out on fulfilling his true potential, as a motivated, creative, unique thinker and person. He is stimulated only by the narrow range of changes in video game levels. He is exposed to thousands of bits per second of subliminal advertising. He is possessed by corporate industry. And throughout his life, he will buy their unnecessary products at ludicrous prices, believing that every next purchase will be the one to finally fill in the void of creative and spiritual emptiness, left behind when his critical thinking skills vacated with the arrival of the technological baby-sitter. In the captive environments of this child’s isolated bedroom and numbed out brain, he forfeits his gifts. He submerges ever-deeper into the depression and boredom of physical and mental stagnancy. He is nervous and may pace back and forth across his room’s floor. He looks out the window and sees other children playing; but is unable to venture outside his enclosure for fear of the unknown. From within the confinement of regret, this child grows up having cultivated a loss of hope that seems virtually irreversible.
* * *
Animals -- every single one of us -- are born to struggle through our existence. In doing so, our particular physical and mental adaptations, designed specifically for the muse of our collective evolutionary purpose, allow us the opportunity to facilitate the forward movement of life, to the very brink of our ability and beyond. Reaching beyond what feels comfortable is what enables our growth and the fulfillment of our great potential. Every single animal deserves the chance to utilize its own body, and realize its strength through weathering the unpredictable demands of freedom.
* * *
The concept of freedom is a mental construct that exists in reference to, and because of, the actuality of Freedom. Meaning, freedom and captivity are concepts of actual states of reality.
If animals were given the choice between the ocean and a cement enclosure, then to hypothesize about their choice between the two would hold validity. But they aren't given a choice. We humans are given the choice, and because we can't find hope in the wilderness of our own hearts, we choose to build cages around what stirs wild and disorderly inside of us.
Regardless of what any animal might choose if given a choice, the hypothetical is irrelevant. If an eagle or a whale had the kind of mind that chose one over the other, they would no longer be the kind of animals they in fact are. Rather, they would be thinking animals. By definition, they would be human. We are the ones with the freedom to choose. And we will continue to restrict animals' freedom until we surrender to our own, and choose to live in accordance with the Free will of Nature itself.
* * *
Still, the zoo keepers at Point Defiance are not my enemies. They are my friends. Loss of hope is the enemy.
Several weeks into my internship, still before I was allowed to touch the whales, I was alone with them for a half an hour in the evening while the other keepers were shifting the polar bears into their dens for the night. I sat by the side of the holding pool, wishing I could run my hands across the smooth surface of their rubbery blubber. Whether they were in the mood to pay attention to me remained a mystery. I was not yet the one to feed them a herring or blow a whistle as a behavioral bridge relaying a message of positive reinforcement.
I stood on the sidewalk, peering over the pool wall at Beethoven, who bobbed slightly up and down on the other side. He looked into my eyes. We didn't speak, but exchanged volumes of wordless emotional information.
I ducked down far enough so that Beethoven lost sight of me. Then I popped back up to find the young male whale looking up at me with an expression of readiness for play. I ducked again, then returned. He stared, captivated, catching onto my game. He appeared to be smiling. I may be anthropomorphizing to say so. But there are evolutionary benefits to each and every physical feature on an animal. A color or shape may be part of a system of defense. One color may attract mates while another deters predators. So why not theorize that the way a whale wears what humans conceptualize as a smile, isn't to their evolutionary advantage? It allows for connective gestures between their species and ours. And if humans feel more connected to a species, they are more likely to try and salvage what's left of it, right?
The third time I ducked, Beethoven did too. He sunk below the surface, down into the pool, then met me where we had begun, face to face. Both of us submerged below the pool's edge for a fourth time, then popped up to meet again. This time, Beethoven arched forward, reaching over the top of the wall with his whole upper body. And on his next ascension, he emerged further still from the water. As we met in the middle, Beethoven's big, rubbery melon gently bumped my forehead. The next couple of times, he touched his head lightly to each side of my face. He had initiated touch, perhaps hearing from my heart that I wished so badly for it, but couldn’t rightfully initiate it myself.
I was too deeply engaged in our communing to realize that S., a work study student my age, had come back into the Rocky Shores area and was watching us. She admitted that she was exhilarated by what she was witnessing. "But be careful," she warned with a hint of disappointment in her voice. "If the keepers see you, you might get in trouble", she said. "I know," I said. "Thanks."
* * *
Beethoven and I communicated that day, and every day we saw one another thereafter. We exchanged cryptic messages with timeless worth and deeply chiseled meaning. And we did it regardless of the rules that said we were supposed to remain separated. We did it regardless of the boundaries that exist between animals and their keepers. Regardless of the perceived opposition between people and other people. Regardless of what logical concepts stand between people and their own internal set of fins or wings.
That whale and I swam together in a dream of freedom. We did it in a sea we made ourselves.
With both strong beliefs and an open mind in tact, I entered the gates of Point Defiance Zoo. I held the honest desire to meet human beings whose livelihood is in training marine mammals. Of course my motives were partially selfish. I was overwrought with desire to get close to the animals. I wanted to touch them and watch their every move. I wanted to learn from them, in an attempt to redeem the plights that humans - in spite of nature - had chosen for them.
* * *
I consider myself to be an activist, although not one who employs so-called "front line" tactics. I am not the one in between the gun and the fur. I am not the one in between the whale and the harpoon. I am not one to hate or blame another for having views that oppose my own. I get angry and sometimes self-righteous. But fundamentally, I realize that these emotions do not fuel the light of positive change. In that movement, I wish to be the one between the match and the candle, inspiring fire to shed new light in minds.
I believe that true activist movements happen when human beings are moved from an emotional place within. This movement then directs itself outward, in the form of actions by the individual that proclaim the motivating ethic of self-responsibility. Prior to working at a zoo, it would have been too easy for me, as an activist "on the side of freedom", to claim that zoos are in opposition to freedom and that, by the law of dual logic, "zoo keepers" are the jailers and the enemies. However, what I truly oppose is this sort of bipolar thinking, which lends itself to a paralysis of forward movement; invariably, it is the opponent of change. I could have adopted the opposing way of thought, and added the fictional genre of zoo keepers to the list of opponents against whom I should spend my life fighting. But what kind of life would that be? It would be a dishonest life, because I had yet to meet a zookeeper in the flesh. And furthermore, because of my born humanness, I am by nature a trapper of wilderness. The understanding of one’s own mortality, set against the background of infinite time, makes an animal afraid. It is what makes the human animal mind a kind of locked chamber of its own.
Zoo keepers were a construct in my mind, as were zoos; the products of stereotypes based on ignorance. How could I have rightfully claimed that this imagined group of characters were the enemies to "my" cause. This would have been yet another convenient way of pushing responsibility onto some other proverbial person's plate, in blame, and denying my own place in this plight that belongs to all of us and each of us. Not only some; not only others.
* * *
The difficulty I encountered when I started the internship surprised me. It was not hard to become comfortable within the confinement of the zoo. It was instead hard to resist the appeal of this "controlled environment", where it was easy and felt safe. The animals were fed on a schedule, and were played with x-amount of times daily. The uncertainty of events extended to which toys we decided to throw into the whale or walrus pool on a given day; to the occasional mixing-up of the feeding and training schedules; and to the choice of enrichment items we would scatter in the animals' exhibits. These might be honey or fruit to activate the animals' olfactory senses; or something new to chew on; sometimes fish frozen in ice for the polar bears. These means of variation were to stimulate the animals, and supposedly assure that their awareness would not atrophy in the absence of Nature's amorphous obstacles.
The conflict I faced, dueling between the comfort of predictability and the challenge of what's wild, was in essence a microcosm of the bigger conflict we face being human animals. We are creatures of nature that think the way humans think. Our minds of logic seek the comfort of control; while the innate know-how of our cells and senses mimic the more fluid dynamic of nature, and a surrendering to what flows. In the natural world, change is an ever-present opponent. And the outcome of every battle an animal fights for its survival is uncertain.
* * *
My interest in whales and dolphins originated as the result of dreams, in which the animals and I coexisted in graceful underwater flight. In these dreams, I experienced a sensation of freedom I have never known in the waking world. I was weightless and gigantic in the same breath. Since the dreams have tapered, I figure that my challenge is to manifest the dreams' intangible intricacies in the actions of my "real" life. I must learn to be weightless in my own body. Transcend the bearing down of gravity. I feel it is my responsibility, as a human being with a free mind, and as an animal who is blessed enough to live a free life, to communicate the importance of freedom to others. The dreams continue to inform me, with every word I speak; behind every act of humanness. Before the beginning of anything.
* * *
During my interview with J., the head trainer at "Rocky Shores" marine mammal habitats, I espoused pieces of my philosophy in response to her questions. I was honest when she asked about my thoughts regarding animals in captivity. "I do not stand on one side of the battle line or the other." I said. "I have had experience at the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, watching killer whales in their natural habitat, and working among some well known scientists in the field of behavioral ecology. Some may see this field as one side of a coin, while captive facilities represent the other side. I agree to an extent. Though I look at both as realistic halves to a whole dynamic. They both exist, as does every shade of gray between them. And I want to understand the whole, not fragments. I want to see the connection between the halves, in order to better understand the tension at their interface. Mostly, I refuse to follow behind the blind lead of misinformed bias."
J. then revealed one of her own beliefs which saddened me. She said , "I don't believe that any true wild exists anymore". I could, of course, understand her reasoning. After all, who has yet to hear that the natural world is under the auspices of human evil, and will soon perish into final extinction? I knew what she was saying all too well. But I had at some point decided that at the root of all human conflict from which destruction emerges was the loss of hope. J.'s comment, to me, translated as a loss of hope. If there was no wild left -- truly, none left in J.'s mind or heart -- what was left to fight for? Might as well live with the locked cage doors and cement walls, night after night, and go home believing "that's just the way it is, and the way it has to be and so will be."
* * *
Hope is the wilderness of the human heart. To hope is to stray from the logic of what appears imminent. Staying locked up behind the belief that all is lost is easier, certainly, than living a wild life -- a life of hope. This life is a challenge. Its challenge is purposeful. And contending with its weight is overwhelming; at times excruciatingly so.
I watched the animals on a daily basis. I saw how genuinely they were cared for. I saw how well they were trained to behave in response to positive reinforcement. Particularly, I watched the whales.
A Skinner Box was filled with saltwater from the Puget Sound, and inside it, two captive-born belugas lived out their days and nights. I wasn't allowed to touch them for the first six weeks of my internship, as touching the body of the whales was to the intern what a big, juicy mackerel was to the whales. It was the greatest reward; the highest form of positive reinforcement. I had many other tasks to work through on the intern checklist before I was allowed to conduct timed play sessions, in which I could throw certain plastic toys into the water for the whales to bring back. I would spend weeks hosing and cleaning exhibits before I was allowed "contact". It was effective training. I behaved the way I knew I had to in order to get what I wanted. And just as Skinner promised, my behavior predicted my reward.
* * *
T. was another keeper at Rocky Shores. One day, T. and I were cleaning out the polar bear dens, when again, the issue of freedom came up in conversation. T. explained to me that she believes both freedom and captivity are human concepts, and concepts alone. This implies that there are not actualities behind the conceptualizations.
I looked around at the dens. They were cold, square, cement cells, each with its fourth wall made of steel bars. Because freedom and captivity are merely human ideas, T. said, animals could not "have", or be had, by either. She also said that, assuming animals did know the difference between their freedom or captivity, and if given a choice between the two, they would choose the latter.
"As humans," she said, "We think in human terms...Sure, if I were an eagle, the sky wouldn't be big enough! If I were a whale, the ocean wouldn't be deep enough! But animals," she said, "are opportunistic. Animals don't want to deal with the hardships of a free life! Not when living enclosed, within a set of simple rules for behavior and subsequent reward is easier. Give an animal all it needs to survive: food (hand-fed), shelter, and a clean, safe enclosure, the animal will be happy. Safe, satiated, and happy."
"The ocean"...she continued. "We idealize the ocean and all the beauty it inspires. But the ocean is a dangerous place! Like a dream, like life, you never know what's going to happen next, or what might be lurking around every corner. We imagine whales and dolphins playing all day long, when truly, they are fighting to stay alive in the unruly underside of the free world."
I could see what she meant; so clearly, in fact, that I almost had trouble forming a rebuttal. Was I beginning to believe in the righteousness of captivity? I couldn't be. Because I had never believed that a life of freedom was easy. Instead I had decided that challenge is what made life an ongoing opportunity for growth. And indeed, what made it worth living.
Without struggling for survival, how is one to grow or evolve to become more efficient a soul? Without trudging through the misshapen terrain nature has laid before us, how are we to take the paths that are rightfully ours to tread? We must pay the price, taking action that will benefit us later with rewards.
Certainly, an animal's life is easier in captivity. And it is easier to justify this belief rather than facing the hardship that accompanies -- rather, defines -- freedom. It is also easier to justify the idea that zoos are the last refuge and hope for the survival of wild animals, in lieu of giving up on saving natural resources and habitats through the promotion of hope in wildness. But putting an animal in a cage is like putting a child in his bedroom with a big-screen t.v., a VCR, a video game system, and the biggest tub of ice cream available at the convenience store. There, he is safe, satiated, and happy. But he has no recognition of his divine gift as a unique biological creation, born to evolve the life and body granted to him. He is left to believe that a sedentary, unhealthy life is enough. Though actually, he grows sick and fat on this diet of gluttonous, commercial feed. And sadly, he is missing out on fulfilling his true potential, as a motivated, creative, unique thinker and person. He is stimulated only by the narrow range of changes in video game levels. He is exposed to thousands of bits per second of subliminal advertising. He is possessed by corporate industry. And throughout his life, he will buy their unnecessary products at ludicrous prices, believing that every next purchase will be the one to finally fill in the void of creative and spiritual emptiness, left behind when his critical thinking skills vacated with the arrival of the technological baby-sitter. In the captive environments of this child’s isolated bedroom and numbed out brain, he forfeits his gifts. He submerges ever-deeper into the depression and boredom of physical and mental stagnancy. He is nervous and may pace back and forth across his room’s floor. He looks out the window and sees other children playing; but is unable to venture outside his enclosure for fear of the unknown. From within the confinement of regret, this child grows up having cultivated a loss of hope that seems virtually irreversible.
* * *
Animals -- every single one of us -- are born to struggle through our existence. In doing so, our particular physical and mental adaptations, designed specifically for the muse of our collective evolutionary purpose, allow us the opportunity to facilitate the forward movement of life, to the very brink of our ability and beyond. Reaching beyond what feels comfortable is what enables our growth and the fulfillment of our great potential. Every single animal deserves the chance to utilize its own body, and realize its strength through weathering the unpredictable demands of freedom.
* * *
The concept of freedom is a mental construct that exists in reference to, and because of, the actuality of Freedom. Meaning, freedom and captivity are concepts of actual states of reality.
If animals were given the choice between the ocean and a cement enclosure, then to hypothesize about their choice between the two would hold validity. But they aren't given a choice. We humans are given the choice, and because we can't find hope in the wilderness of our own hearts, we choose to build cages around what stirs wild and disorderly inside of us.
Regardless of what any animal might choose if given a choice, the hypothetical is irrelevant. If an eagle or a whale had the kind of mind that chose one over the other, they would no longer be the kind of animals they in fact are. Rather, they would be thinking animals. By definition, they would be human. We are the ones with the freedom to choose. And we will continue to restrict animals' freedom until we surrender to our own, and choose to live in accordance with the Free will of Nature itself.
* * *
Still, the zoo keepers at Point Defiance are not my enemies. They are my friends. Loss of hope is the enemy.
Several weeks into my internship, still before I was allowed to touch the whales, I was alone with them for a half an hour in the evening while the other keepers were shifting the polar bears into their dens for the night. I sat by the side of the holding pool, wishing I could run my hands across the smooth surface of their rubbery blubber. Whether they were in the mood to pay attention to me remained a mystery. I was not yet the one to feed them a herring or blow a whistle as a behavioral bridge relaying a message of positive reinforcement.
I stood on the sidewalk, peering over the pool wall at Beethoven, who bobbed slightly up and down on the other side. He looked into my eyes. We didn't speak, but exchanged volumes of wordless emotional information.
I ducked down far enough so that Beethoven lost sight of me. Then I popped back up to find the young male whale looking up at me with an expression of readiness for play. I ducked again, then returned. He stared, captivated, catching onto my game. He appeared to be smiling. I may be anthropomorphizing to say so. But there are evolutionary benefits to each and every physical feature on an animal. A color or shape may be part of a system of defense. One color may attract mates while another deters predators. So why not theorize that the way a whale wears what humans conceptualize as a smile, isn't to their evolutionary advantage? It allows for connective gestures between their species and ours. And if humans feel more connected to a species, they are more likely to try and salvage what's left of it, right?
The third time I ducked, Beethoven did too. He sunk below the surface, down into the pool, then met me where we had begun, face to face. Both of us submerged below the pool's edge for a fourth time, then popped up to meet again. This time, Beethoven arched forward, reaching over the top of the wall with his whole upper body. And on his next ascension, he emerged further still from the water. As we met in the middle, Beethoven's big, rubbery melon gently bumped my forehead. The next couple of times, he touched his head lightly to each side of my face. He had initiated touch, perhaps hearing from my heart that I wished so badly for it, but couldn’t rightfully initiate it myself.
I was too deeply engaged in our communing to realize that S., a work study student my age, had come back into the Rocky Shores area and was watching us. She admitted that she was exhilarated by what she was witnessing. "But be careful," she warned with a hint of disappointment in her voice. "If the keepers see you, you might get in trouble", she said. "I know," I said. "Thanks."
* * *
Beethoven and I communicated that day, and every day we saw one another thereafter. We exchanged cryptic messages with timeless worth and deeply chiseled meaning. And we did it regardless of the rules that said we were supposed to remain separated. We did it regardless of the boundaries that exist between animals and their keepers. Regardless of the perceived opposition between people and other people. Regardless of what logical concepts stand between people and their own internal set of fins or wings.
That whale and I swam together in a dream of freedom. We did it in a sea we made ourselves.
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